Anonymous

An anti-Israel hacking collective affiliated with Anonymous says it has initiated a widespread cyber attack against the Jewish state, penetrating websites affiliated with the Mossad security service and a slew of related entities. The hackers claimed late Friday that they have obtained and released personal information relating to 35,000 Israeli government officials, including politicians, military leaders, and police officers, according to a Twitter feed associated with the hackers. ...

BBC: Hacking group Anonymous has aided a global search for a cyber-vandal who defaced a charity website. Members of Anonymous helped track the attacker down to Madrid following a plea from the owner of the RedSky video production company. New Zealand-based RedSky asked for help after an attacker penetrated its website, erased data and left graffiti. The attack was reportedly carried out in a bid to impress Anonymous and join its ranks as a member. ...

FoxNews: International hacking group Anonymous took at least 10 Australian government websites offline briefly Tuesday in a series of escalating attacks over proposed changes to privacy laws. The Australian arm of the group has warned it will continue the attacks on “.gov.au” sites until plans to force ISPs to store user data and make it further available to security services are shelved. The attacks started after Prime Minister Julia Gillard answered policy questions via webcam in an online Google+ Hangout session on Saturday but the sites targeted so far are all run by the Queensland State Government. ...

SophosLabs: Is it possible to fight Anonymous? The movement is proud of saying that an idea can’t be arrested or killed, but it seems like the Boston Police Department has thought of one way of fighting back: sarcasm. A week ago, the BPDNews.com website which provides news about the Boston police and crime in the area was hacked by Anonymous. The hackers replaced the home page of the site with a message and a video of American rapper KRS-One performing his song “Sound of Da Police”. ...

Mashable: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has been under fire from world leaders to step down this week. He’s also under fire from hacktivist group Anonymous, who leaked hundreds of his office’s emails on Monday. While Anonymous is infamous for its hacking know-how, it doesn’t take a genius computer programmer to guess one of the passwords commonly used by Assad’s office accounts: 12345. The string of consecutive numbers is the second-weakest password according to a 2011 study. ...

My Personal Opinion: I doubt if that site is really their official website or not Sophos Labs: Within days of the hacktivist group Anonymous announcing it was setting up its own social network (after being unceremoniously booted off Google+), its plans have taken a somewhat humiliating turn. AnonPlus, Anonymous’s planned social network, has been defaced by rival hackers. A group of hackers apparently based in Turkey replaced AnonPlus’s main webpage with an image of a dog wearing a suit, mocking the more normal Anonymous logo, and messages in Turkish and English: ...

Anonymous claims to have stolen around a gigabyte of classified NATO data The H-Online Security wrote: In a post on Twitter, the Anonymous hacker group said that it has managed to steal a number of secret documents from one of NATO‘s servers. As proof, Anonymous published two PDF documents from 2007 and 2008 that are allegedly from NATO. The classification “NATO Restricted” suggests that the documents are intended only for circulation within the organisation – if they are genuine. The hacktivists say they copied a gigabyte of data in total, but added that it would be “irresponsible” to publish most of the material. ...