LONDON — The loose-knit hacking movement Anonymous claimed Sunday to have stolen thousands of credit-card numbers and other personal information belonging to clients of U.S.-based security think tank Stratfor. One hacker said the goal was to pilfer funds from individuals’ accounts to give away as Christmas donations, and some victims confirmed unauthorized transactions linked to their credit cards.
Anonymous boasted of stealing Stratfor’s confidential client list, which includes entities ranging from Apple Inc. to the U.S. Air Force to the Miami Police Department, and mining it for more than 4,000 credit- card numbers, passwords and home addresses.
Austin, Texas-based Stratfor provides political, economic and military analysis to help clients reduce risk, according to a description on its YouTube page. It charges subscribers for its reports and analysis, delivered through the Web, e-mails and videos. Proprietary information about the companies and government agencies that subscribe to Stratfor’s newsletters did not appear to be at any significant risk, however, with the main threat posed to individual employees who had subscribed.
Hackers’ taunt
“Not so private and secret anymore?” Anonymous taunted in a message on Twitter, promising that the attack on Stratfor was just the beginning of a Christmas-inspired assault on a long list of targets.
Anonymous said the client list it had posted was a small slice of the 200 gigabytes worth of plunder it stole from Stratfor and promised more leaks. It said it was able to get the credit-card details, in part, because Stratfor didn’t bother encrypting them — an easy-to-avoid blunder that, if true, would be a major embarrassment for a security-related company.
Fred Burton, Stratfor’s vice president of intelligence, said the company had reported the intrusion to law enforcement and was working with it on the investigation.
Hours after publishing what it claimed was Stratfor’s client list, Anonymous tweeted a link to encrypted files online with names, phone numbers, e-mails, addresses and credit- card-account details.
“Not as many as you expected? Worry not, fellow pirates and robin hoods. These are just the ‘A’s,” read a message posted online that encouraged readers to download a file of the hacked information.
The attack is “just another in a massive string of breaches we’ve seen this year and in years past,” said Josh Shaul, chief technology officer of Application Security Inc., a New York-based provider of database-security software.
Secrets shared?
Still, companies that shared secret information with Stratfor to obtain threat assessments might worry that the information is among the 200 gigabytes of data that Anonymous claims to have stolen, he said.
“If an attacker is walking away with that much e-mail, there might be some very juicy bits of information that they have,” Shaul said.
Lt. Col. John Dorrian, public- affairs officer for the Air Force, said that “for obvious reasons” the Air Force doesn’t discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats or responses to them. Miami Police Department spokesman Sgt. Freddie Cruz Jr. said he could not confirm that the agency was a client of Stratfor, and he said he had not received any information about a security breach involving the Police Department.
Anonymous also linked to images online that it suggested were receipts for charitable donations made by the group using the credit-card data it stole.
“Thank you! Defense Intelligence Agency,” read the text above one image that appeared to show a transaction summary indicating that an agency employee’s information was used to donate $250 to a nonprofit.
Past victims
Anonymous previously has claimed responsibility for attacks on credit-card companies Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., eBay Inc.’s PayPal and groups in the music industry and the Church of Scientology.
