After announcing they had defaced Websites belonging to more than 70 different law enforcement agencies across the U.S., hacktivist collective Anonymous, as part of the AntiSec movement, declared in a statement posted online that they had released roughly 10GB of data stolen during the compromise, including “hundreds of private email spools, password information, address and social security numbers, credit card numbers, snitch information, training files and more.”
The group said its actions were in response to the arrests of dozens of people last month in connection with last year’s denial-of-service attacks against PayPal as well as the arrest of Jake Davis of Shetland, U.K., whom British authorities have accused of being “Topiary”, a hacker group spokesperson.
According to the hacktivists, they were able to compromise servers at Brooks-Jeffrey Marketing (BJM), an Arkansas company that operates a computer store and an online marketing firm.
“It took less than 24 hours to root BJM’s server and copy all their data to our private servers,” they said in a statement. “Soon after, their servers were taken down and a news article came out suggesting they received advance FBI “credible threat” notice of a “hacking plot”…However we were surprised and delighted to see that not only did they relaunch a few sites less than a week later, but that their “bigger, faster server that offers more security” carried over our backdoors from their original box. This time we were not going to hesitate to pull the trigger: in less than an hour we rooted their new server and defaced all 70+ domains while their root user was still logged in and active.”
Brooks-Jeffrey has remained mum on the incident, and did not respond to a SecurityWeek request for comment before publication.
According to the hacktivists, the stolen credit card information was used to make donations to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), as well as other organizations such as the Bradley Manning Support Network (Manning was the soldier arrested in the WikiLeaks probe) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
