Anonymous' Stratfor hack outs intelligence officials across the world

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Published time: January 09, 2012 18:53
Edited time: March 07, 2012 12:31

The hackers responsible for a Christmas Eve attack on consulting firm Stratfor released more information over the weekend, this time divulging email addresses, log-ins and passwords for thousands of affiliated parties.

Among those affected by the dump of data include hundreds of officials within both the US and UK intelligence communities, as well as the American armed forces. Roughly 19,000 email addresses ending in the domain extension .mil for the US military were published in the leak. John Bumgarner, a cyber-security expert at the US Cyber Consequences Unit, mulled over the data for the UK’s Guardian and said that info on 173 individuals deployed in Iraq were among those published in the latest posting.

Also targeted in the latest leak are 242 staffers with NATO and two men on the who’s who of twentieth-century American politicians: former Vice President Dan Quayle and Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under the Nixon administration.

Stratfor, a Texas-based consulting firm, was victimized by hacktivists believed to be aligned with the online collective Anonymous. On December 24, 2011, initial information on the infiltration was first published to the Web, which has since been punctuated by a sprinkling of other data dumps, including the latest over the weekend. Millions of emails have also been obtained by the group, though the correspondence remains to be revealed to outsiders.

Once made public, however, the rest of the data uncovered in the attack could serve as some serious fodder for lobbying complains against those with ties to Stratfor.

“The Stratfor operation may yield the most revelatory trove of information ever seized by Anonymous,” Barrett Brown, an operative close to the hack, tweeted on Christmas Eve. To the Daily Mail, Brown added that the emails could “provide the smoking gun for a number of crimes of extraordinary importance.”