Federal Reserve Confirms Data Breach

A document containing business data, including some personal details, from several regional U.S. financial firms was leaked by Anonymous earlier this week. On Tuesday, the Federal Reserve confirmed that one of their systems was breached, but would not directly link the breach to the data released by Anonymous’ OpLastResort.

The leaked data contains business addresses, firm names, representative names and titles, phone numbers, in addition to more than a dozen personal email addresses. There are also salted password hashes, and a table defining the salt used. For the most part, the leaked information is public record, aside from the personal email account field. The people represented are for the most part high ranking officials at the smaller firms. The list didn’t include data from major firms such as Chase, PNC, BofA, or Citi Group.

The records were leaked by Anonymous’ OpLastResort, a campaign that arrived on the Web shortly after the death of Aaron Swartz. This same group has previously attacked other U.S. Government domains, going so far as to hijack one domain in order to turn it into a game of Asteroids.

On Tuesday, the Federal Reserve said in a statement to the media that they are aware that information was obtained by exploitation of a vulnerability in a website vendor’s product. However, the statement went on to add, critical operations were not impacted.

“The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product. The exposure was fixed shortly after discovery. It is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system…” – Jim Strader, Federal Reserve spokesperson

The leaked data, more than 4,000 records, was initially placed on the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center (ACJIC). The file has since been removed and the website taken offline. However, copies of the file are now being hosed on several domains, including a gov.cn URL. Calls to some of the people on the list have confirmed that the information is valid, and relatively recent.