/ 21 July 2011

Anonymous defies hacker hunters

Anonymous Defies Hacker Hunters

Notorious hacker group Anonymous on Thursday posted a defiant message to police and boasted of plundering sensitive data from Nato computers.

“We are not scared any more,” read an online message that purported to be a response by Anonymous and splinter group Lulz Security.

“Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea … there is nothing — absolutely nothing — you can possibly do to make us stop.”

As if to underscore its point, a message posted on its Twitter account by @AnonymousIRC claimed to have looted about a gigabyte of Nato data that even the rebel hacker group deemed too sensitive to release.

What, me worried?
“Yes, we haz [sic] more of your delicious data,” the Twitter post read. “You call it war; we laugh at your battleships.”

According to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Anonymous did post a 36-page document dated August 2007 — titled ‘CIS Support for New HQ ISAF Joint CIS Control Centre” — along with a 10-page document dated January 2008 and titled ‘Outsourcing of Balkans CIS Support.”

CIS typically stands for communication and information systems. ISAF is the Nato-led mission in Afghanistan.

Both documents feature Nato logos and ‘Nato Restricted” headers, but their validity could not immediately be verified. They were released on a Belgian national holiday, with Nato headquarters closed.

“We did not know that Nato HQ was closed today,” AnonymousIRC tweeted later. “So sorry. Did we wake anybody?”

On Tuesday, US authorities arrested 16 people for cyber crimes including 14 people suspected of taking part in an online attack on the PayPal website claimed by Anonymous.

The US indictment against the 14 hackers alleges the denial of service (DDoS) attacks on PayPal were “retribution” because the site terminated a donation account for the whistle-blowing group WikiLeaks. — Sapa-AFP