Last month saw a rash of hacks hit a variety of high profile targets including NASA, the U.S. Air Force, the French Ministry of Defense, the European Space Agency, the Bahrain Ministry of Defense, the Thai Royal Navy, and Harvard University’s School of Public Health—the attackers, acknowledged now as a hacker crew going by the moniker of “The Unknowns” absconded with documents from the afflicted organizations.

Most of the attacks happened late in the month and we’re just now getting confirmation from organizations such as NASA. The hackers, meanwhile, posted proof of their exploits on Pastebin (http://pastebin.com/uhWSRrSf) including screenshots and pilfered documents.

“Victims, we have released some of your documents and data,” the group wrote on a web posting. “We probably harmed you a bit but that’s not really our goal because if it was then all of your websites would be completely defaced but we know that within a week or two, the vulnerabilities [sic] we found will be patched and that’s what we’re actually looking for. We’re ready to give you full info on how we penetrated threw your databases and we’re ready to do this any time so just contact us, we will be looking forward for this.”

A NASA spokesman, contacted by ABC News, said, “NASA security officials detected an intrusion into the site on April 20 and took it offline. The agency takes the issue of IT security very seriously and at no point was sensitive or controlled information compromised. NASA has made significant progress to better protect the agency’s IT systems and is in the process of mitigating any remaining vulnerabilities that could allow intrusions in the future.”

The group is somewhat chatty on Twitter, according to ABC News, and one member with the handle ZyklonB tweeted that they had also penetrated the Oak Ridge National Laboratory—although such a compromise was denied by the laboratory.

According to an article on ZDNet, the hacker group has not just released sensitive documents from NASA and the European Space Agency, but also names, e-mails and home addresses of 736 victims on Pastebin.

NASA and the ESA confirmed that they’d been hacked last week on May 4 and patched their systems against future intrusion. According to The Unknowns, getting these organizations was supposedly their goal—and they too acknowledged that patches were now in place.

In addition to revealing how to access the computer systems of the organizations in question, The Unknowns also posted screenshots showing they gained accessed to each and every one.

The group even put together 250MB worth of military documents from their hacks and uploaded the collection to MediaFire. Some of the leaked documents were several years old, but there were also a few from earlier in 2012.

The group has distanced themselves from Anonymous and has posted a manifesto speaking to their hacking prowess and current career on Pastebin:

We are a new hacker group, we have never been in any hacking team before. We are not Anonymous Version 2 and we are not against the US Government.

We can’t call ourselves White Hat Hackers but we’re not Black Hat Hackers either…

Now, we decided to hack these sites for a reason…

These Websites are important, we understand that we harmed the victims and we’re sorry for that – we’re soon going to email them all the information they need to know about the penetrations we did.

We still think that what we did helped them, because right now they know that their Security is weak and that it should be fixed.

We wanted to gain the trust of others, people now trust us, we’re getting lots of emails from people we never knew, asking us to check their website’s security and that’s what we want to do.

Our goal was never to harm anyone, we want to make this whole internet world more secured because, simply, it’s not at all and we want to help.

We don’t want revolutions, we don’t want chaos, we just want to protect the people out there.

Websites are not secured, people are not secured, computers are not secured, nothing is…

We’re here to help and we’re asking nothing in exchange.

Chances are good their manifesto will be staying on Pastebin; but the proof of the exploit and the leaked sensitive documents will probably be going away soon. It may be a common place for hackers to pin up their trophies; but the site has been taking a harder line about documents that include sensitive information. Of course, it will crop up other places.

According to some investigation into what’s been happening, it looks like the most recent hacks by The Unknowns took the shape of SQL-injection attacks allowing them access to underlying databases and file systems to take documents and information. However, people also discovered that old hacks from early 2012 (pre-April) had also delivered documents that the hacker group was using to puff up their resume.

Perhaps we’ll be seeing them more often in the future, so SiliconANGLE will be on the lookout.