In this violation of the Sedena systems, thousands of confidential documents of the Mexican federal government were revealed, although Mexico was not the only target of this attack.
Beyond the details that were discovered in the leaked documents, it is interesting to recognize who the members of Guacamaya are and what they are looking for, a group that has already managed to put several government administrations in Latin America in check.
One of the first times we heard from this group of hackers was on September 19, when the organization claimed a violation of the security system of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Chilean Armed Forces (EMCO), on which occasion they leaked about 400 thousand emails from the agency.
Until that moment, Guacamaya focused on revealing confidential data of mining and oil companies that, according to the group, would have violated the rights and well-being of the environment in “Abya Yala”, the way in which they refer to Latin America.The truth is that this approach changed in recent months, when Guacamaya announced the operation “Operation Repressive Forces.”
Macaw who are they?
According to what was published by the group in a statement, this plan would have the purpose of revealing confidential information from police institutions and the army of various countries in Latin America, including Chile, El Salvador, Peru, Colombia and Mexico.
The group affirms that these government agencies in said countries exercise control and monopoly of violence at the intra-state level”, while serving the supposed “capitalist purposes” of the United States:
“It is in these supposed independences and in their supposed path to freedom and democracy, where the armed armies are created (…). This is why Guacamaya infiltrated his systems and made public the documentation of these entities of terror, where the above is demonstrated “
With this in mind, Guacamaya defines itself as:
«We are all, all those people ancestrally affected by the invasion and dispossession of Abya Yala; we are the daughters and sons of those who defended life, with life itself, we are from the south, the center, the north, the Caribbean, we are daughters and sons of mother earth, we were, are and will be in any corner where the invader, settler, neo-settler, extractivist looter, violate rights«
The slope of cybersecurity in LATAM
Thus we are facing a group that, contrary to the common idea of hackers in the world, are not moved by economic interests (at least in the first instance), but rather have social and political motives.
At this point, what is demonstrated after the extraction of about 6 terabytes of information from Sedena and thousands of documents in other countries in the region, is that Latin America has a large debt in terms of cybersecurity.
History has shown that in times of internal or external political and social tension, it must be critical for governments to protect their systems from cyberattacks. However, everything indicates that Latin America is not ready to face the challenge.
During 2021 alone, cyber attacks increased 600 percent in the region, adding 289 billion hack attempts, according to Fortinet data. Seen by countries, Mexico is in the first position with 53.9 percent of the attempts, followed by Brazil with 30.6 percent.
Additionally, according to the National Cybersecurity Index of the E-Governance Academy, Latin America ranks sixth among the regions in the world that have prioritized the development of cybersecurity strategies and mechanisms, just above Africa and Oceania.