Pages

July 10, 2012

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

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.

Last week's WikiLeaks dump comes five months after the publication of hundreds of e-mail messages from the webmail server of Syria's Ministry of Presidential Affairs, including messages sent between President Bashar al-Assad and his wife. Saturday's announcement from Anonymous said that February's dump "remained just a tiny fraction of the total data recovered in the original hack."

WikiLeaks officials said they have yet to verify the authenticity of each e-mail acquired, but that they are "statistically confident that the vast majority of the data are what they purport to be."

5 comments:

  1. OK, so "anonymous" is the NSA?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Suspect as we all now know that Anonymous was infiltrated and directed by FBI. WikiLeaks has also been suspect as a Mossad front. As the info is suspect one must revert to ones knowledge of the West's M.O.. Syria is under attack by a proxy army of Nato, headed by the US. The US of course is a puppet government of Israel's zionist regime.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Cue Bono?
    Once again Israel.
    WikiLeaks Assange = Mossad

    ReplyDelete
  4. So we now know 'anonymous' is a total fraud and that at least some of their so-called hackers are nothing but a front for NATO and the NOW including Israel and all its criminality and illegal wars.
    Syria is defending iutself from islamic terror paid for by some countries in NATO and the gulf.
    Like Serbia and Libya before it.
    I will now only look at 'anonymous' with utter contempt.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The same Wikileaks that's scanned by Israel to make sure the information presented is "safe to print"? That's not a source, that's a coverup. I dunno how much this is truthful...

    ReplyDelete