Monday, March 12, 2012

Anonymous made fraudulent charges worth $700K in Stratfor attack

Meghan Kelly


The FBI has revealed that there were $700,000 worth of fraudulent credit card charges after hacktivist group Anonymous stole nearly 200 gigabytes of data, including credit card numbers, from security firm Stratfor.
“At least $700,000 worth of unauthorized charges were made to credit card accounts that were among those stolen during the Stratfor Hack,” said Mahil Patel of the FBI to a judge overseeing the Stratfor case.
Stratfor, which has a number of high-profile clients including the Department of Defense, Lockheed Martin, and Bank of America, was breached in December. Soon thereafter hacker Jeremy Hammond was arrested for leading the attack.
Anonymous stole a large amount of user names and passwords, in addition to some 60,000 credit card records, after exploiting vulnerabilities to reach Stratfor’s servers. At the time, Anonymous said it would use the credit cards to make charitable donations — money that would obviously never see the hands of the needy. One VentureBeat tipster claimed Anonymous actually charged $300 worth of hooded sweatshirts to an account.
The damages may still be growing, however. The FBI explained that the $700,000 figure did not include any charges on credit card records that have not yet been reviewed. The number Patel offered the judge only referenced records reviewed between December 6 and early February.
In addition to the credit card numbers and other personally identifiable information, Anonymous also stole emails from Stratfor executives, including chief executive George Friedman. These emails were subsequently fed to Wikileaks which, with participation from a number of publications around the world, began publishing the emails in late February. Some emails held what Wikileaks considered damning information, including odd nicknames such as “Hizzies” for members of Hezbollah and “Adogg” for referencing Iran president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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