The Competition Commission has launched a witch-hunt to prosecute several unknown people, which it believes cracked a confidential report and posted it online.
The report, 22 months in the making, is the culmination of the commission's banking competition enquiry, which started in 2006. “This is frustrating for us,” says the commission's manager of stakeholder relations, Nandi Mokoena.
The 590-page document contains some information that most of the “Big Four” banks would prefer to keep under wraps. This includes customer profiling information and other titbits the banks claim to be trade sensitive. The commission guaranteed the banks that the information presented would not be made public.
Mokoena says the commission's banking enquiry site published a censored version of the report, with the intention of making at least some of the information accessible to the consumer. Instead of removing the sensitive information, the commission used an electronic “blackout” to hide what was not for public consumption.
How it was done
According to the commission, the hackers used a software package to remove the censoring layer and published the document on a local IT news and forum site, along with instructions on how to crack these types of documents.
“We immediately contacted the site and asked them to remove the information, which they did. We also removed that version from our site, photocopied and scanned the document, so that the blacked-out areas could not be cracked,” she explains.
However, not long after that, the uncensored version appeared on Wikileaks, a US-based online “confidential” content-sharing Web site, which targets government documents.
Wikileaks was founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from various countries, including SA. It hosts thousands of leaked confidential government documents and has faced several legal battles.
The commission has requested the site remove the confidential document, however, it is still freely available and the authority's letter has now also been published. “The problem is that none of these people are actually interested in the content. The only comments that we have seen since this incident has started have been about the cracking of the file, and nothing about the report itself.”
Legal manoeuvres
Mokoena explains that the Competition Commission is consulting with legal experts on how best to proceed from here. “We did consider that the document has already reached the public domain, and while there is little we can do about that, we have to make a stand.”
The commission is still unsure who the hackers are. However, they have their forum aliases, which were used on the local site, and it plans to use those as a start.
The police could not be reached to comment on what kind of action could be taken. However, the SAPS Intelligence Unit is expected to take the lead in this type of investigation.
Related stories:
Beware of the user
Cyber-crime dampens festive cheer
Local firms lack e-mail governance
Share