Anonymous releases documents stolen from U.S. government contractor

PanARMENIAN.Net - The hacking collective Anonymous released documents it claims were stolen from U.S. government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

The documents Anonymous released Monday, July 11, on The Pirate Bay contained personal and official email addresses and passwords of an estimated 90,000 United States military employees. Anonymous announced the massive data dump on its Twitter feed as part of "Military Meltdown Monday," eWEEK reported.

The approximately 190MB data torrent included log-in information of personnel from U.S. CENTCOM, SOCOM, the Marine Corps, Air Force facilities, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State and other private-sector contractors. The passwords were unsalted SHA1 hashes stored as a text string, making them vulnerable to being cracked using brute-force methods, Alex Rothacker, director of security research for Application Security's TeamSHATTER, said.

The group also claimed to have uncovered “maps and keys for various other treasure chests buried on the islands of government agencies, federal contractors and shady whitehat companies.” Anonymous also stole 4GB of source code from its Subversion code repository and erased it from the servers.

Anonymous linked Booz Allen Hamilton with HB Gary Federal, and claimed both companies were working on a project to "manipulate social media."

Anonymous is doing exactly what many security experts have warned: by compromising one server, the attackers transform themselves from intruders to trusted insiders. Attackers often go after "softer, easier targets" to gain a foothold in the network, Josh Shaul, CTO of Application Security, said.