From the Wall Street Journal:
Among those charged Tuesday was 27-year-old Jeremy Hammond of Chicago. Investigators said Hammond boasted that he’d snared the personal data of a former U.S. vice president and one-time CIA director as part of an attack in December of Strategic Forecasting Inc. or Stratfor, a global intelligence firm in Austin, Texas, that affected up to 860,000 victims.
The government said Hammond conspired to hack into computer systems used by Stratfor, which describes itself as a subscription-based provider of geopolitical analysis.
It said he and co-conspirators stole credit card information for approximately 60,000 credit card users and used some of the stolen data to make more than $700,000 in unauthorized charges.
Court papers said a January email titled “Official Emergency Communique Straight from the Anonymous Hacker Underground” was sent to the company’s customers whose accounts had been compromised. The papers said it claimed: “The sheer amount of destruction we wreaked on Stratfor’s servers is the digital equivalent of a nuclear bomb: leveling their systems in such a way that they will never be able to recover.”
Among the other information is that central turncoat hacker “Sabu” was living on welfare in public housing when he undertook all the attacks that he was involved in. In the indictments, he has been described as a “rooster,” an advance scouter of system vulnerabilities that he or others would then attack.
Strangely, associates in Italy’s Anonymous group undertook to hack the Vatican’s computers in retaliation, because . . . I don’t know. Vagina? Seems like a little bit of Oedipal lashing out, to me.
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