The latest casualty in the string of cyber breaches is IRC Federal, an engineering contractor that works for federal agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The offenses involve theft of sensitive internal documents contained in database and e-mails, as well as generally despoiling the website (the standard defacement slash cyber graffiti.) The misdemeanor was initiated by AntiSec, a part of hactivist collective Anonymous, and was reported to involve members from the recently-disbanded LulzSec. IRC refused to comment on the issue: “We reported it to the authorities, and otherwise we have no comment.”

As usual, the hacking group dumped the details on Pastebin, along with a rant: “In their emails we found various contracts, development schematics, and internal documents for various government institutions including a proposal for the FBI to develop a “Special Identities Modernization (SIM) Project” to “reduce terrorist and criminal activity by protecting all records associated with trusted individuals and revealing the identities of those individuals who may pose serious risk to the United States and its allies”. We also found fingerprinting contracts for the DOJ, biometrics development for the military, and strategy contracts for the “National Nuclear Security Administration Nuclear Weapons Complex”.

The hacking group is grimly criticizing corrupt corporations and government sectors, as well as FBI’s plan of forming a “Special Identities Modernization (SIM) Project,” aimed to protect records associated with “trusted individuals,” while taking the wraps off individuals believed to impose serious threat against the US. Yet gain, the FBI didn’t say anything.

The incident happened shortly after the arrest of 15 purported members of Anonymous in Italyand Switzerlandwhose age ranging from as young as 15 years old to 28 years old. A similar incident also happened last month, arresting 3 men in Spainand 32 in Turkeyfor having connection with Anonymous. Instead of stopping the group, the arrest seems to have fired up the group with a vow to strike back. There were reports of the group breaking into Italian universities and taking down hundreds of Turkish websites.

This is not the first time an FBI-related website is compromised by a cyber attack. Last month, Infragard, an FBI-affiliate website was breached by Lulzsec, naming Obama and Nato as the inspiration for their hacking efforts because of their treatment of hacking as an act of war. The FBI sought LulzSec with a search warrant in Ohio with speculations of a teenager target to follow the capture of 19-yr-old Ryan Cleary in the UK. However, shortly after the reported closure is an interview of a LulzSec member with a NewScientist journalist. He said his hacktivist involvement came due to humanitarian nerve and not purely for the laughs.

LulzSec’s impact on internet culture cannot be taken lightly. Though the group claims to have been dead, new ones have sprung up to pick up where they dropped off. A group called Connexion Hack Team released about 17,000 random e-mails and passwords last week.