anonymization

Hackers target Westboro Baptist Church after Newtown threat

A group attached to the online hacktivist group Anonymous claims to have hacked the Web site of the Westboro Baptist Church in response to plans by the controversial church to picket the funerals of those massacred Friday at a school in Newtown, Conn.

As part of a campaign dubbed #OpWestBoro, KY Anonymous said yesterday it posted the personal information belonging to members of the extremist organization, which is best known for conducting protests designed to disrupt the funerals of members of the military killed in action. The data dump included the names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and physical addresses of … Read more

GhostShell claims breach of 1.6M accounts at FBI, NASA, and more

Team GhostShell, the hacktivist collective, said today that it has stolen accounts from a large number of government agencies, contractors, and security firms, posting information from 1.6 million accounts online.

Dubbed Project White Fox, the hacking project appears to have affected NASA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and Interpol, among many others. The hackers announced their work in a file posted on Pastebin.

Our colleagues at ZDNet report:

The file dump, upon closer inspection, seems to include a number of records obtained via SQL injection. A random selection of the files contain email and home addresses, defense material tests and … Read more

U.K. convicts Anonymous member 'Nerdo' for DDoS attack

In its ongoing pursuit to strike back at hackers, U.K. courts have convicted a member of Anonymous for conspiracy.

A London jury found Christopher Weatherhead, a 22-year-old self described "hacktivist," guilty of carrying out a campaign of Distributed Denial of Service attacks against major credit card companies that refused to process online donations to WikiLeaks, according to the U.K.'s Crown Prosecution Service. The conviction came after guilty pleas of three of Weatherhead's co-conspirators.

"Christopher Weatherhead is a cyber criminal who waged a sophisticated and orchestrated campaign of online attacks on the computer systems … Read more

Anonymous declares war on Syrian government Web sites

Concluding that the Syrian government was responsible for the country's Internet blackout, the online hacktivist group Anonymous has announced a campaign against Syrian government Web sites hosted outside the country.

The Middle Eastern country began experiencing an Internet outage earlier today, and many people on Twitter reported that phone lines are down as well. All 84 of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the Internet, according to Renesys, which operates a real-time grid that continuously monitors Internet routing data.

Anonymous said it had conducted an "exhaustive analysis" of the blackout … Read more

Hackers steal and publish e-mails from U.N. nuclear agency

Hackers have made their way into one of the servers of the United Nation's International Atomic Energy Agency, according to Reuters. The agency confirmed that the hackers stole information and published it online.

"The IAEA deeply regrets this publication of information stolen from an old server that was shut down some time ago," agency spokesperson Gill Tudor told Reuters. "The IAEA's technical and security teams are continuing to analyze the situation and do everything possible to help ensure that no further information is vulnerable."

A group that calls itself "Parastoo" claimed responsibility … Read more

Anonymous escalates its 'cyberwar' against Israel

Anonymous' hacking campaign against Israel to protest its attacks on Gaza escalated today with the release of a list of thousands of individuals who supposedly donated to a pro-Israel organization.

The collective posted a Pastebin document that it said featured names -- and in some cases home addresses and e-mail addresses -- of donors for the Unity Coalition for Israel, which claims to represent "the largest network of pro-Israel groups in the world." The document appears to be quite old: one of the military e-mail addresses belonged to Douglas Feith, the U.S. undersecretary for defense under Bush, … Read more

Israel government Web sites hit by hacker blitz

Israel's government Web sites have been bombarded by hackers in the last couple of days, logging more than 44 million hacking attempts since Israel launched the Gaza air strikes on Wednesday.

One of the attempts was successful, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz told Reuters, noting that an unidentified site was offline for about 10 minutes before being resurrected. Popular targets include defense-related sites, as well as those of Israel's prime minister, president, and Foreign Ministry.

Most of the attacks have been traced to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

"The ministry's computer division will continue to block the … Read more

Anonymous targets Israeli Web sites in protest over Gaza

Anonymous is in the midst of a hacking campaign against a number of Israeli sites in protest of attacks taking place on Gaza.

The hacking spree, dubbed OpIsrael and begun early Thursday, has resulted in so many Israeli Web sites being defaced or shut down through methods including denial of service (DoS) attacks, that it's hard to keep count. However, some enterprising hacktivists have begun compiling lists of affected Web sites. Targets have included governmental, retail, and business sites -- some belonging to the automotive and fashion industries.

The Bank of Jerusalem, one of Israel's largest financial institutions, … Read more

Anonymous hacking spree hits PayPal, Symantec

The press arm for Anonymous has announced that it has begun its hacking spree for the 5th of November -- Guy Fawkes Day -- and claims to have dumped user and employee account information on accounts from PayPal, Symantec, Australian government Web sites and much more.

Monday's main focus seems to be an anti-surveillance protest -- as with the recent Anonymous October 20 protest -- with November 5th intent aimed at surveillance systems such as TrapWire and INDECT.

Trapwire and INDECT's opponents believe that the surveillance systems to be direct threats to privacy and certain civil … Read more

Anonymous takes aim at Zynga

The hacktivist group Anonymous apparently is perturbed by the financial situation at Zynga.

A posting on the AnonNews site this morning posits that layoffs at Zynga will help to bring about the "end of the US game market as we know it" as jobs get shipped overseas, a plan that the AnonNews report says was discovered in confidential files leaked from the games maker.

During the last few days anonymous has been targeting Zynga for the outrageous treatment of their employees and their actions against many developers.

We have come to believe that this actions of Zynga will … Read more