Hacked: Syria's Ministry of Presidential Affairs

Hackers aligned with Anonymous have exposed hundreds of e-mail messages from the Web-mail server of Syria's Ministry of Presidential Affairs, the support ministry for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Ars Technica reports.

Among the exposed e-mail messages was a set of talking points for Assad's interview with Barbara Walters in December 2011.

According to Geek Sailor, the Anonymous hackers revealed up to 78 e-mail accounts on Syria's Ministry servers, and they noticed a very interesting thing. Of the 78 passwords leaked, 31 of them were “12345″, which shows just how inspired the Ministry members were when choosing to protect their e-mails.

Most of the remaining passwords were poor variations of “12345″, while other passwords were “iloveyou”, “testing”, “123vivasyria”, “honda2011″, or “system”.

The attack on Bashar al-Assad from Anonymous comes at a tense time for the Syrian President as he has been receiving intense pressure from other world leaders to step down from power this week as he orders the military and its snipers to shoot anyone in opposition to his rule, CBR writes.