UPDATED 13:21 EDT / MARCH 04 2013

NEWS

Anonymous Publishes Data from Bank of America to Avenge Espionage

The hacker group Anonymous has stuck again. The loosely associated hacking collective group, which has hacked financial institutes, government websites, the Pentagon, GoDaddy, and others, has released huge 16 GB block of software, data, and code related to Bank of America.

The data was not due to one Anonymous hack, but the group found a misconfigured server in Israel, where BofA was practically open and accessible.

One Anonymous subgroup, identifying itself as Par:AnoIA (Anonymous Intelligence Agency) released a press report on Wednesday to discuss some of the details of the hacking. The information suggests that Bank of America is running an online intelligence gathering operation against hacktivists.

“The source of this release has confirmed that the data was not acquired by a hack but because it was stored on a misconfigured server and basically open for grabs,” Par:AnoIA said. “Looking at the data it becomes clear that Bank of America, TEKSystems and others (see origins of reports) gathered information on Anonymous and other activists’ movement on various social media platforms and public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels.”

The hack data includes information on social network reconnaissance, memos from IT contractor TEKsystems to the bank’s security staff, and reporting chat room, a list of more than 10,000 words, phrases, Wikipedia entries — everything from “jihad” to “keg stand.” The group alleged that the data clearly shows that the research was sloppy, random and valueless. Apparently a keyword list was used to match items of interest on IRC, Twitter and other social media.

“We were amused by the fact that there are actually paid analysts sitting somewhere reading the vast amount garbage that scrolls by in large public channels like #anonops and #voxanon,” Par:AnoIA said in a statement accompanying the leak. “Even more amusing is the keyword list that was found, containing trigger words like ‘jihad’ or ‘homosexual’.”

The bank had instructed security experts to identify specific groups’ threats to spy and monitor. Thus it appears from the data that the Wall Street activists were screened by third-party companies.

“Anonymous has become well known for small groups carrying the banner of the hactivism collective against perceived enemies of the people,” says HackANGLE editor Kyt Dotson. “In 2011, Anonymous attempted to use Nov 5–a date close to the provacteur nature of the collective due to its connection to Guy Fawkes and the V for Vendetta mask used in their propaganda–as a rally point to unleash on Fox News alongside a call for customers to transfer money out of international banks. Needless to say, nothing much happened then either.”

The Bank of America was linked to efforts to collect information about members of Anonymous and its partner organizations, especially Aaron Barr, who previously announced that he had succeeded in unmasking the key figures in the organization. In retaliation, Anonymous hacked into the HB Gary Federal System, took over its Twitter account and revealed 68,000 emails, including a presentation made to Bank of America by HB Gary Federal in cooperation with other intelligence agencies.

The Wall Street bank raised the ire of Anonymous in 2010, when it announced it would stop processing payments to WikiLeaks. Similar movements made by MasterCard, Visa and PayPal also triggered retaliatory cyber-attacks by the hacker group.


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