UPDATED 13:47 EDT / JULY 21 2011

NEWS

From Anonymous to NATO: This is No Longer Your World

Following the footsteps of Lulz Security, Anonymous appears to have picked fights with the same figures LulzSec welcomed war against–a number of FBI-affiliated websites, and now NATO. The hacker collective posted on their site that they obtained a gigabyte of NATO data, and on their Twitter feed, the group said they find it “irresponsible” to publish the information. The hacker also bragged that it was quite easy to get hold of the data.

It’s unclear if @AnonymousIRC represents an actual group or if they’re a recombinator Twitter account run by an individual who relays information into the wild about the activities of multiple subfactions at this time, however, it’s obvious that they’re definitely dialed in with a subfaction capable of getting hacks done.

The group posted two documents so far, as linked from their Twitter account. The first one is titled “NATO Restricted,” while the other appears to be a 2008 document called “Outsourcing CIS in Kosovo.” The group promised to release more information over the next couple of days. The FBI already arrested 14 people believed to be members of the collective Tuesday–along with two more men believed to have a connection with the group. Moreover, the group didn’t like it when NATO said, “the longer these attacks persist the more likely countermeasures will be developed, implemented, the groups will be infiltrated and perpetrators persecuted.”

Anonymous responded to NATO in a letter saying: “Do not make the mistake of challenging Anonymous,” warned the group. “Do not make the mistake of believing you can behead a headless snake. If you slice off one head of Hydra, ten more heads will grow in its place. If you cut down one Anon, ten more will join us purely out of anger at your trampling of dissent.”

Retackling the mischief of Anonymous since its ingress to pick up where LulzSec left off, the group severed 51 Malaysian government websites with the belief that the Internet is here to liberate people and the Malaysian government is too strict and violating basic human rights. Malaysia has blocked Pirate Bay and Wikileaks, as well as movies and television shows. “We fear that if you make further decisions to take away human freedom. We are obligated to act fast and have no mercy. For rules were meant to be broken. And corruption was meant to be washed away and forgiven. Now we will wash your corruption away so be prepared. Take this as a favor,” the group said.

Malaysia was followed by Turkey. Anonymous especially took delight in hacking Turkey because the country found fit to cut off the Internet in order to “protect their citizens,” which we can immediately translate to “suppressing information from leaking outside their walls.” Anonymous defaced 74 Turkish websites as part of the “Turkish Takedown Thursday.”

We can also point right back to how the collective broke into the website of FBI-affiliate IRC Federal, leaking sensitive internal documents and outright defacing the website. The details were posted on PasteBin. The group expressed dismay against 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.” These specialized projects involve the development of “persona management” software that would allow small groups to puppetmaster large groups of false identities on social media in order to spread propaganda and cyber-astroturf.

Lastly, there’s the leaks of over 90,000 emails from Booz Allen Hamilton, a consulting firm that works with the US Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Security Administration (NSA). “We infiltrated a server on their network that basically had no security measures in place,” Anonymous wrote. “We were able to run our own application, which turned out to be a shell and began plundering some booty. Most shiny is probably a list of roughly 90,000 military emails and password hashes (md5, non-salted of course!). We also added the complete sqldump, compressed ~50mb, for a good measure.”


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU