Cyber Threat Actor: Chilean Hackers

The threat actor knownas Chilean Hackers operates under that alias and is based in Chile, as indicated by open‑source reporting. The group has been described in public sources as a hacktivist collective that carries out operations against governmental entities to highlight perceived injustices and demand political change. Their activities are not presented as financially motivated or espionage‑driven but rather as protests aimed at exposing institutional weaknesses and advocating for accountability.

In terms of targeting, the actor has focused on governmental institutions in both Bolivia and Chile, specifically the Bolivian Army’s email infrastructure and a Chilean agency responsible for indigenous development benefits. The sectors involved are defense and public administration, with the geographic scope limited to the Andean region of South America. The strategic objectives cited by the group include revealing alleged corruption within the Bolivian military and protesting inequitable distribution of state benefits to indigenous communities, accompanied by a public call for the Chilean president’s resignation. These objectives are framed as efforts to raise awareness about systemic discrimination and inadequate data protection for vulnerable populations.

Regarding tactics, the actor’s known initial access vectors involve exploiting a known Zimbra vulnerability and taking advantage of weak server configurations, as seen in the Bolivian Army breach. No specific malware families or custom tooling are referenced in the available reports, indicating reliance on publicly available exploits and straightforward configuration weaknesses. Attribution to a state sponsor or criminal consortium has not been established in public sources; the group is presented as an independent hacktivist entity operating from Chile. The two publicly reported operations—the 2016 breach of the Bolivian Army email servers and the 2016 leak of over 300,000 Chilean citizens’ personal data from the indigenous benefits agency—serve as representative examples of their campaign activity, demonstrating a pattern of targeting government systems to leak sensitive information and accompany the disclosures with political messages.