Anonymous to donate $1mln to charities using stolen credit card details

PanARMENIAN.Net - The hacking group Anonymous which appears to have recently hacked servers belonging to security think tank Stratfor, is said to be planning to donate around $1 million to various charities in the coming days, Digital Trends reported.

Hacktivist collective Anonymous appears to have been making charitable donations to a number of organizations using credit card information stolen from U.S.-based security think tank Stratfor.

According to a Telegraph report, one of the alleged perpetrators said the hack marked the beginning of what will be a week-long series of similar attacks, with the aim of using gathered credit card data to make further Christmas donations to the tune of $1 million.

Posts on a Twitter feed linked to the group suggested it had pulled more than 200GB worth of sensitive information from Stratfor’s servers, a company that Anonymous says has the U.S. Army, the US Air Force and the Miami Police Department among its client list.

Anonymous claimed that Stratfor had failed to encrypt any of the credit card information on its servers, which if confirmed would be hugely embarrassing for a global intelligence company. The hacker group later tweeted a link to images it said were of receipts for donations made to charity using the credit card information it had stolen.

One of the receipts bore the name Allen Barr, who up until his recent retirement had been working for the Texas Department of Banking. Barr confirmed that $700 had been transferred in a number of transactions from his bank account to several charities, without his consent.

An emailed statement to members signed by Stratfor’s chief executive, George Friedman, said the company was taking steps to deal with the incident. “We have reason to believe that the names of our corporate subscribers have been posted on other websites. We are diligently investigating the extent to which subscriber information may have been obtained,” Friedman wrote.