Anonymous takes credit for hack that exposes 2.4 million Syrian e-mails

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/07/anonymous-takes-credit-for-syrian-emails-hack/

By Dan Goodin
Ars Technica
July 9, 2012

Members of the Anonymous hacking collective are taking credit for the 
theft of more than 2.4 million e-mails from Syrian governmental 
officials and contractors that were later published by WikiLeaks.

The whistle-blower website announced the massive document dump on 
Thursday. The cache includes communications from 680 Syria-related 
entities or domain names, including the Ministries of Presidential 
Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport, and Culture, 
WikiLeaks officials said. In all, the leak includes 2.4 million e-mails 
sent from 678,752 different addresses to more than 1 million recipients. 
It comes amid a government crackdown on dissidents that has killed as 
many as 15,000 Syrians in the past 18 months, according to some 
estimates.

"The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to 
Syria's opponents," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in Thursday's 
press release. "It helps us not merely to criticise one group or 
another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is 
only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve 
it."

According to a separate communication released over the weekend, people 
affiliated with Anonymous pulled off the "massive breach of multiple 
domains and dozens of servers inside Syria" that made the WikiLeaks dump 
possible. The hack took place on February 5 and was so involved that 
teams worked in shifts around the clock for weeks to pull it off. The 
downloading of such a large data set required several additional weeks. 
The announcement provided no evidence to prove the claims were real.

[...]


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