Anonymous releases restricted NATO document

ComputerWorld

But the hacker collective said it won't release emails allegedly hacked from The Sun tabloid just yet

The hacking collective Anonymous released a document on Thursday marked "restricted" from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The 36-page document, which is dated Aug. 27, 2007, appears to be budget and equipment outlays for what was termed a new "HQ ISAF JOINT CIS CONTROL CENTRE." NATO's press office could not be immediately reached.

Anonymous claimed on its "AnonymousIRC" Twitter handle that it has 1GB of material from NATO but said that most would not be published because it would be "irresponsible." 

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In another Tweet, Anonymous said that the data was harvested via "simple injection," which usually refers to inputting malformed data in Web-based forms and seeing if the back-end database responds with information.

The group prefaced its release of the NATO document with an earlier comment on Twitter about its alleged trove of e-mail from the British tabloid The Sun, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. media group that is under investigation for voicemail interception and paying police officers for information.

"We think actually we may not release emails from The Sun, simply because it may compromise the court case," according to a Twitter post from Anonymous.

LulzSec, known as LulzSecurity, claimed credit on Twitter on Monday for that attack, but the two groups are somewhat aligned. Although LulzSec said it was going dormant after a string of highly successful attacks against the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, PBS.org and Fox.com, among others, it appears to be back in action. LulzSec hit The Sun's website on Monday, posting a fake news story that Murdoch had died.

The two groups also posted a statement on Pastebin directed at Steven Chabinsky, a deputy assistant director in the U.S Federal Bureau of Investigation's cyberdivision.

 "Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea," the statement said. "Any attempt to do so will make your citizens more angry until they will roar in one gigantic choir."

Still, law enforcement isn't doing too bad. The FBI said on Wednesday it had arrested 14 people suspected of conducting distributed denial-of-service attacks against PayPal in December 2010. PayPal, along with Visa, MasterCard, Western Union and Bank of America, came under attack by Anonymous following their severing of payment links that funneled donations to the whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.

Hackers to FBI: 'We are not scared anymore'

MSNBC

Hacker groups Anonymous and LulzSec, which had 16 of their alleged members arrested this week in the U.S. by the FBI, don't usually respond to statements written or made about them. But when the FBI's deputy assistant director gave an interview to NPR saying those arrests send "a message that chaos on the Internet is unacceptable," the hacking collective erupted, with a statement of its own:

We are not scared any more. Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea. Any attempt to do so will make your citizens more angry until they will roar in one gigantic choir. It is our mission to help these people and there is nothing — absolutely nothing — you can possibly to do make us stop.

In the NPR interview that aired Wednesday, Steven Chabinsky, of the FBI said that even if "hackers can be believed to have social causes, it's entirely unacceptable to break into websites and commit unlawful acts."

Feds arrested 14 of the 16 Tuesday on charges tied to last December's attacks on PayPal as retribution for dropping WikiLeaks' donation account. Another two were arrested on charges related to intrusion and theft from computer systems at InfraGard, which has an IT contract with the federal government, and from AT&T.

The FBI's arrests took place in several states, including Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio.

Arrests, too, were made by the UK's Metropolitan Police Service and the Dutch National Police Agency in connection with the alleged cyber crimes.

In the U.S., Anonymous and LulzSec have taken credit for recent hacks and sharing of information from sites affiliated with the FBI, as well as from Arizona law enforcement, and the private groups they groups deem to be corrupt.