Christmas is the season of giving, and infamous hacker collective Team GhostShell apparently wanted to celebrate by leaking over a million public agency records. It’s all a part of #ProjectWhiteFox, a movement to promote freedom of information on the Internet.
Team GhostShell linked to a pastebin press release on its Twitter account yesterday announcing its last hack of the year. In total, the group leaked 1.6 million records from public agencies like NASA, ESA, the Pentagon, and more. Here’s the relevant part of the press release:
Winter is here and so are we, to present Team GhostShell’s last project. We’ve included plenty of surprises in this one, so hop on our bandwagon, we’re going on an adventure!
#ProjectWhiteFox will conclude this year’s series of attacks by promoting hacktivism worldwide and drawing attention to the freedom of information on the net. For those two factors we have prepared a juicy release of 1.6 million accounts/records from fields such as aerospace, nanotechnology, banking, law, education, government, military, all kinds of wacky companies & corporations working for the department of defense, airlines and more.
The group says that they sent out emails to various public and private agencies warning them of security risks. Those messages went unheeded and so GhostShell exploited security holes and made off with the aforementioned 1.6 million accounts. One such target was the Credit Union National Association, which has already acknowledged the attack. It said no sensitive information, like credit card numbers, were taken.
After all that is said and done, the hacker collective took time out to address the current negotiations at the ITU conference. It hasn’t participated in any of the attacks on the WCIT Web site, but it said that it supports Anonymous’ ongoing efforts in OpWCIT. It also encourages Web sites to “deface” themselves in protest of any further Internet regulation.
As far as results go, Team GhostShell is probably the most successful in the hacktivist scene. A large majority of Anonymous members rarely actually do anything beyond the odd DDoS attack. Team GhostShell has been dumping records and information all year. This week’s release may be the last of the year, but it’s obviously not the end for one of the Internet’s most infamous groups.
[h/t: ComputerWorld]