5 Secrets Anonymous Should Steal from China

Over the last few weeks, the hacker collective Anonymous has shifted its attention to China. On March 30, Anonymous China defaced the first five of what would soon be hundreds of business and a few minor official websites, warning the Chinese government that it is “not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall.” The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” (commonly known as “Teenage Wasteland“) played on many of the sites, and Chinese netizens were directed to a link that explained how to get around Internet controls. Another hacker associated with the group LulzSec told Reuters that he breached the China National Import & Export Corporation, a defense contractor, and downloaded company documents to several file-sharing websites.

The group is apparently not based in China, and appears to rely on translation tools to work through Chinese networks. So far Anonymous China hasn’t exposed anything particularly damaging. But China is a great country in which to dig: lacking a free press and ruled by the intensely paranoid Communist Party since 1949, it holds many secrets stored in fusty computer files across the Web.

Knocking down the Chinese regime is a tall order, but Anonymous China could certainly damage the Communist Party’s reputation. Here are five websites the group could hack for real secrets, Chinese-style:

1. China’s Central Organization Department and the Party History Research Center

The Chinese Communist Party, via its Central Organization Department (COD), reportedly keeps personal dossiers on every current or past official of the party above a certain rank.

The COD, the HR lobe of the party brain, is so secretive it doesn’t even have a public website, but Anonymous China could hack the websites of local Party History Research Centers, party clearinghouses that should contain the records of important officials at earlier stages of their career.

Want to know what Bo Xilai, the now-deposed party secretary of Chongqing and the center of China’s biggest political scandal in a generation did in Dalian? Hack the provincial party history website.