Sweden's Watergate

An anonymous reader writes, "Sweden's ruling Social Democratic Party's internal network has been illegally accessed several hundred times over a period of several months. Party treasurer Tommy Ohlstroem describes the incident as "wide-scale and systematic." Computer security company Sentor's investigation has revealed intrusions originating from computers belonging to Sweden's Liberal Party, and with the upcoming election in only two weeks many commentators are already describing this as Sweden's Watergate (Swedish only). An employee of the Young Liberals has admitted to unauthorized access, but a series of mysterious coincidences in the form of exceptionally well timed public announcements by the Liberal Party suggests the involvement of more than one person."

Comments

Seems like a borrowed idea

[A beautiful mind]

Just before 2006's Hungarian Parliamentary Election, the Hungarian Socialist Party accused the Alliance of Young Democrats with accessing the private server of theirs. The "proof" was a screenshot from a Win2003 server log showing the host belonging to the party. The accused party countered by showing proof that their internal site was systematically accessed by the other party, also showing logs.

The internal server of the Socialist Party turned out to be a password protected http server containing some upcoming promotional campaign pictures, with some trivial password like hsp:redflower. The pass somehow leaked and thousands of other people viewed it, myself included, before it became a "scandal" and "proof of hacking" and "ServerGate".

I hope the swedish parties are more grown up than to play stupid games like that and I hope the swedish public is more educated than the hungarian, so that they can tell if nothing extraordinarily happened, just some PR hype..

Re:Explanation of 'swedish liberal'

[DaveRexel]

No need for downmodding, the "Folkpartiet liberalerna are not one of the two major parties" as it's true that they belong very firmly to a grouped entity that forms the right-wing coalition in Swedish politics.

The largest party in the opposing coalition, that is "Socialdemokraterna" is the hackee and this smaller party in the other block is the hacker, but, living in Sweden, my suspicions run deeper than this:

*- A focus on hacking so the governors can impose higher surveillance.
      Remember the ruling Swedish coalition, with the Socialdemokraterna in the leadership;
      Taking orders from Hollywood and confiscating the Pirate Bay servers...

*- A very Swedish joke, i.e. an easily exposed attempt
      - that shows the oppositions lack of IT-skills
          (That's a head-shot in the pre-election posturing IMHO)

*- This breach is old news, why expose it now?

*- Profit!! [Sorry, can't ever make a list without Profit! at the end ;-) ]