Anonymous seem to be starting the New Year with a bang with the compromise of California Statewide Law Enforcement Association’s (CSLEA) website, and New York Police Chief’s email.
This follows on from the Stratfor hack on Christmas Eve, in which user names, password hashes and credit card details were leaked. As well as allowing Anonymous to use these credit card details to make donations to Charities as part of OpRobinHood
Initially Anonymous were targeting financial institutes “to rob from the rich”, looks like they came up against a brick wall with their SQL injection attacks against banks, and switched to easier targets, in this case Stratfor.
Sabu the de-facto leader of Lulzsec tweeted that they had compromised Stratfor months ago, and had possibly been issuing false intelligence reports that there media and intelligence customer rely on.
Stratfor have yet to comment fully about how long they suspect the breach to their systems has been going on. In the world of hacking, cyber-espionage, and ecrime there is always deception, disinformation and misdirection, and Sabu could well be using twitter to feed false information.
The proof though may be in the 200Gbs of data that Anonymous allegedly have stolen from Stratfor, and if this is true this could be even more damaging then the recent release of usernames and passwords.
We will most definitely see Anonymous and #Antisec target defense contractors, security, intelligence and police forces, later this year, but are they punching above their weight? Last year among others we saw them target the CIA, FBI, SOCA, and the Italian National Anti-Crime Computer Center.
By targeting these types of organizations, Anonymous will see a swifter response from law enforcement, as happened last year with the arrest of Kayla, Topiary and Recursion.
The breach though of Stratfor on Christmas Eve was reminiscent of Kevin Mitnicks attack of Tsutomu Shimomura’s computers on Christmas Day, 1994. While Christmas being the season of good will, for hackers it is usually one of the best times to compromise a system. This is due to the majority of people spending the time away from work, which can reduce the response time to react to an intrusion.
Will this year be a happy new year for law enforcement or Anonymous? It is not though going to be a happy new year for Anonymous next targets…
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