The hacking collective Anonymous released a document on Thursday marked “restricted” from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The 36-page document, which is dated Aug. 27, 2007, appears to be budget and equipment outlays for what was termed a new “HQ ISAF JOINT CIS CONTROL CENTRE.” NATO’s press office could not be immediately reached.
Anonymous claimed on its “AnonymousIRC” Twitter handle that it has 1GB of material from NATO but said that most would not be published because it would be “irresponsible.”
In another Tweet, Anonymous said that the data was harvested via “simple injection,” which usually refers to inputting malformed data in Web-based forms and seeing if the back-end database responds with information.
The group prefaced its release of the NATO document with an earlier comment on Twitter about its alleged trove of e-mail from the British tabloid The Sun, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. media group that is under investigation for voicemail interception and paying police officers for information.
“We think actually we may not release emails from The Sun, simply because it may compromise the court case,” according to a Twitter post from Anonymous.
LulzSec, known as LulzSecurity, claimed credit on Twitter on Monday for that attack, but the two groups are somewhat aligned. Although LulzSec said it was going dormant after a string of highly successful attacks against the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, PBS.org and Fox.com, among others, it appears to be back in action. LulzSec hit The Sun’s website on Monday, posting a fake news story that Murdoch had died.
The two groups also posted a statement on Pastebin directed at Steven Chabinsky, a deputy assistant director in the U.S Federal Bureau of Investigation’s cyberdivision.
“Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea,” the statement said. “Any attempt to do so will make your citizens more angry until they will roar in one gigantic choir.”
Still, law enforcement isn’t doing too bad. The FBI said on Wednesday it had arrested 14 people suspected of conducting distributed denial-of-service attacks against PayPal in December 2010. PayPal, along with Visa, MasterCard, Western Union and Bank of America, came under attack by Anonymous following their severing of payment links that funneled donations to the whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.
Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com