According to the Washington Post, hacking activist group Anonymous has released 200 GB of data that was procured from security think tank Stratfor earlier this week. The data includes the user names, passwords and email addresses of over 850,000 Stratfor users in addition to 75,000 credit card numbers for premium users of the Stratfor service. The organization provides intelligence and analysis related to security related matters, both domestic and international, and offers this information to the U.S. government as well as the private sector. According to a statement from Anonymous, approximately six percent of the email addresses end in .mil and .gov.
Anonymous has also threatened a new attack to occur today and targets include law enforcement agencies across the United States. There’s no clear motive included within the statement released with the Stratfor data dump beyond a general dislike for government agencies. Within the statement, Anonymous wrote “All our lives we have been robbed blindly and brutalized by corrupted politicians, establishmentarians and government agencies sex shops, and now it’s time to take it back.”
Since the attack on December 24, Stratfor’s official Web presence has been taken offline and the organization stated that the relaunch of the site wouldn’t take place until 2012. Stratfor’s CEO George Friedman released a statement on the organization’s Facebook page earlier this week and agologized for the security breach. Friedman also mentioned that anyone affected by the breach would be offered a free one-year subscription to an identity protection service.
While Stratfor’s users are likely annoyed by the exposure of personal data and financial information, Stratfor officials are also concerned about the 2.7 emails stolen during the attack. Similar to other data dumps, the emails have the potential to embarrass both the organization and members of the U.S. government or military that utilize Stratfor’s services. Anonymous has yet to release the emails to the public, but the hacking group has mentioned the data in multiple public statements.
