#OpLastResort continues as a branch of Anonymous continues its war against the U.S. government in response to the death of Aaron Swartz. The last major offensive saw Anonymous hacking the Fed and releasing banker records on the net.
In its latest attempt to get the government’s attention, Anonymous announced that it hacked the State Department . To top if off, the hacker collective also released a database it found while going through the Web site. The database contains the personal information of State Department employees in the U.S. and overseas. The information in the dump includes names, birth dates, phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, etc.
According to Anonymous, this latest hack is not only a continuation of #OpLastResort, but a response to the U.S. arresting and imprisoning members of Anonymous. Here’s the full statement:
Our reasons for this attack are very simple. You’ve imprisoned or either censored our people. We will not tolerate things as such. You don’t see us going around censoring everything that is inappropriate or we do not like. Basically, you tried to put an end to us and you got owned, there’s nothing more you can say or do. You took away Topiary, Avunit, Neuron, Pwnsauce, lolspoon, Aaron Swartz shall we go on? Heck you think this makes us weak? We are only growing stronger because of the fact that you are forcing us to revolt. When the lions roar you will hear them. And when it’s feeding time you’ll be our dinner.
Aaron Swartz this is for you, this is for Operation Last Resort.
We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.
#OpLastResort
The State Department wasn’t the only target of this latest hack. Anonymous also targeted private investment firm George K. Baum and Company. The site was defaced with a link to a pastebin that featured private account information of all the firm’s customers. According to the OpLastResort Twitter feed, this particular hack was made because of the firm’s ties to Stratfor, the private intelligence company that Anonymous hacked into last year.
Once again, it looks like #OpLastResort won’t be slowing down anytime soon. Anonymous will continue looking for exploits in government Web sites, and publicly hack them for all to see. At this point, it’s not so much about getting any kind of information, but rather just embarrassing the government.
It will be interesting to see how Obama’s new cybersecurity executive order will affect how the government reacts to attacks from Anonymous. The new rules for information sharing between public and private institutions may just help stop some of these attacks before they happen, but it isn’t likely.
[h/t: Net-Security]