Anonymous releases NATO data documents

PanARMENIAN.Net - The hacking group Anonymous which accessed about 1 gigabyte of restricted material from NATO servers on Thursday, and released a few of the documents as proof of its cyber-incursion says it will continue to release all the NATO documents and still has the capability to download NATO data, according to a hacker who maintains that he is part of Anonymous and goes by the name "Commander X".

In his e-mail to CBS News, the Commander X said, "the documents are classified NATO procurement and procedure files mostly describing NATO secure communications networks. Although there may be other incredible stuff we have not found yet in the cache, as it is a huge dump and we are only now getting into a lengthy analysis. It will take weeks just to analyze what we have already, and we also still have access to the NATO servers and we are still downloading databases."

As Commander X noted in a videotaped interview with CBS News, "the power of Anonymous is that we have the ability to effect change on the Internet. You have a site online all of a sudden, we snap our fingers and that site is gone."

Anonymous showed off a piece of its NATO cache via a link on its Twitter page to a document with the text "NATO Restricted" about "Outsourcing CIS in Kosovo," dated January 2008. Restricted is NATO's lowest level of document classification.

A NATO spokesman said the organization is aware of Anonymous' hacking claims, and that NATO security experts are conducting an investigation. "We strongly condemn any leak of classified documents, which can potentially endanger the security of NATO Allies, armed forces and citizens," he said.

This week FBI arrested 14 suspects in connection with December attacks claimed by Anonymous on PayPal, the Internet payment service that had stopped processing donations for Wikileaks. There were dozens of arrests globally related to the investigations into hacking attacks by Anonymous. A 16-year-old was arrested late last year in the Netherlands for the DDoS attacks on payment companies that stopped enabling WikiLeaks to receive donations. That was followed by five arrests in the U.K. and 40 search warrants carried out in the U.S. in January. In June, three people were arrested in Spain for an attack on a Spanish government site (a Spanish police site was then attacked in retaliation), and 32 people were arrested in Turkey a few days later.