Anonymous, the group of online hackers notorious for its politically charged “hacktivism,” has released a massive batch of internal Bank of America emails. Anonymous’ host site for the internal emails has received crippling amounts of traffic and has been intermittently accessible since shortly after the documents were posted.
The documents indicate that Bank of America improperly foreclosed on several homes during the height of the financial crisis in 2008, thus starting the recession. A former employee of Bank of America subsidiary Balboa Insurance, a risk management and insurance firm, reportedly corresponded with Bank of America employees and was told to falsify loan numbers on documents to force Bank of America to foreclose on homeowners.
A Bank of America spokesperson told Reuters that the documents were clerical and administrative documents that were stolen by a former Balboa employee, and were not related to foreclosures.
It looks like the hacker group has made good on a promise Wikileaks founder Julian Assange made several months ago. Anonymous sided with Assange when several sites and services like PayPal cut ties with Wikileaks’ founder due to concerns about the legality of the site. Assange and Wikileaks indicated that they planned to publish the documents in December. In the past, Anonymous coordinated massive direct denial of service (DDoS) attacks on other sites including PayPal and Mastercard in defense of Julian Assange.
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