AntiSec, an offshoot of the hacktivist group Anonymous, claims to have been reading the emails of various law enforcement agencies for more than a week.
And today, dubbed “Fuck FBI Friday,” the group has threatened to release over 38,000 emails “containing detailed computer forensic techniques, investigation protocols, and highly embarrassing personal information,” a member of the group told the Daily Dot. That action could occur at any moment now.
“The focus of this release is a special agent supervisor of the Department of Justice (California) in charge of Computer Crime Investigations,” the member said, though AntiSec plans to continue releasing data periodically in the coming months.
The first release, however, is supposedly a good get for the hacker community. According to the AntiSec member, the emails “detail the methods and tactics cybercrime units use to gather electronic evidence, conduct investigations, and make arrests. …
“Information from this release will prove essential to those who want to protect themselves from the techniques and procedures cyber crime investigators use to build cases.”
Basically, the source said, “the release is a gift to the blackhat community.” (Black hats are hackers who penetrate systems for personal gain or malice, as opposed to white hats, who study security vulnerabilities in order to protect systems.)
In the run-up to today’s main release, the group has already made public three separate “teasers” in the last 24 hours, as proof of their prowess. The “teasers,” posted on Pastebin, a website often used by Anonymous and other groups to share text documents, show law enforcement correspondence. The latest displays FBI Director Robert Swan Mueller’s personal information.
Jimmy Weg of Montana’s Computer Crime Unit confirmed to the Daily Dot that the information displayed on Pastebin was in fact his. Weg went on to state every person whose emails were displayed was made aware of the leak, though he declined to comment further.
At the time of this publication, two IACIS websites, cops.org and iacis.com, have been taken down, an event likely attributable to AntiSec.
AntiSec, which has been making headlines since earlier this year, claimed responsibility for hacking into a Neo-Nazi site in Finland, and for attacking police websites in support of Occupy Wall Street.
Photo by Newton graffiti
