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Uncategorized Tuesday, May 22nd 2012 at 3:13 pm

Department of Justice Hacked, Anonymous Taking Credit

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A Department of Justice spokeswoman has revealed that several unauthorized users gained access to a server that hosts the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ website. You can probably guess who’s taking responsibility: Your friendly neighborhood collection of loosely-associated self-proclaimed hacktivists, Anonymous. Anonymous claims that among the spoils of the hack, there are internal emails and a full database dump which may contain data the Bureau has been collecting about cybersecurity incidents.

The 1.7 gb of data yielded from the hack were disseminated by torrent, but due to complications, are currently inaccessible. According to the Anonymous affiliate allegedly responsible for illicit dump, progress on all downloads is being hampered by yet another hacker, who is attacking the computers seeding the stolen data. Yeah, it’s crazy out there.

While we wait with bated breath for the torrent issue to be fixed so we can find out what is in the collection of pilfered data, the Department of Justice is looking into its options for finding and presumably prosecuting any Anonymous affiliates who can be hunted down. For the moment, the DoJ is looking into whether or not the hackers actually violated any computer use laws, but confirming that they did would only be the first step in a long process.

This isn’t the first time that Anonymous has hit cybersecurity data where it lives; back in February, Anonymous published an FBI conference call in which the problem of Anonymous was discussed. If previous Anonymous hacks are anything to go by, the data from this little sortie is unlikely to contain anything Earth-shattering and will, instead, be mostly a source of embarrassment. Still, Anonymous ought to be careful who they are poking with sticks considering that bills like CISPA, and cybersecurity fears in general, tend to stem from these sort of antics, and the government’s attempts to put a stop to this kind of behavior, while unlikely to be successful, are likely cause a lot of collateral damage. Then again, it’s not really in character for Anonymous to “play it safe.”

(via Mashable, Reuters)

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  • Jack Bond

    You know, Anon wouldn’t have any reason to do all these illegal things if we stopped encouraging them by clamoring to rifle through all the info they’re harvesting.

  • http://twitter.com/SharkAttackShow Shark Attack Media

    we would stop clamoring to rifle through it if the government wasnt fucking us in the ass with every step

  • Jack Bond

    Yeah, our government representatives that we chose are fucking us in the ass… So instead of taking responsibility and choosing better representatives, we should ignore the legal system and devolve the country into anarchy.

  • Anonymous

    “Absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal.”

    I am okay with this.

  • Jack Bond

    Absolute freedom includes things like freedom to murder. Would you be okay if we adopted anarchy and I went over to murder you?

  • Anonymous

    You are being silly. Of course I don’t endorse violence unless for self defense. That is why anarchy is so appealing. I do hope your view of anarchy extends beyond teenagers with anarchy shirts and bad attitudes.

  • Jack Bond

    With an absence of government, there’s no organization to enforce order and therefore the fact that you don’t endorse violence is irrelevant.