Submission + - French lawmakers' personal info published... on Pa (expatica.com)
(Pastebin is a site usually used for copying'n'pasting snippets of code during collaborative development or debugging,)
According to a communiqué published on the hacking / collaborative journalism site Reflets.info, the file was obtained by exploiting an obvious SQL injection attack at a Web hosting company (website currently down).
In addition to the published information, the accessible databases also contained vast quantities of emails, logins and passwords, including lawmakers' credentials for accessing the private portal of the French National Assembly.
The crackers point to the fact that instead of publishing a relatively innocuous subset of the information they found, they could simply have published all informations, including credentials for access to official sites, sold it to foreign countries, or used the information to write emails in the name of lawmakers and members of the executive.
They explain their gesture by a desire to turn the tables on the UMP party, for having voted in favor of the creation of files on French citizens, and supporting an administration that has spied on journalists, beaten protesters, ignored and beaten asylum seekers, blamed social ills on Roma people, etc.
Lawmaker Muriel Marland-Militello, from the city of Nice, on the French Riviera, blames "cyber-idealists" for failing to see that the Internet can be used for negative actions as well as for good ones, points to (unspecified) attacks on children by pedophiles hundreds of kilometers away, and pushes a bill doubling the penalties for cracking a system if it is operated by the government or a public service."