Anonymous hack of DOJ causes more embarrassment than actual harm
On Monday, hacktivist group Anonymous announced it will be releasing 1.7 gigabytes of private data it has acquired from the United States Department of Justice, in an event it called "Monday Mail Mayhem." The group claimed the act was being done to "spread information, to allow the people to be heard and to know the corruption in their government. We are releasing it to end the corruption that exists, and truly make those who are being oppressed free."
New York-based security company Identity Finder ran an analysis on the data after it was released on Tuesday, and found the file dump actually contained no sensitive personal information, no secret internal documents, and no internal emails.
It actually was relatively minor, save for the "lulz" that Anonymous said it enjoyed "as [the DOJ] took the website down after being owned, clearly showing they were scared of what inevitably happened."
According to Identity Finder, the uncompressed file was actually 6.5 gigabytes in size, contained a folder named "Mail," which contains only three unique email addresses, two of which are administrative: [email protected], [email protected], and one personal, d*****@ui.urban.org.
The group did manage to obtain the website components for the Bureau of Justice Statistics (http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/) which included the entire Web server file structure, javascript files, css files, server and error logs and other files common to Web servers. This information could be used to help them perform future attacks, or could be useful to other hackers who want more insight into network topology.
There is also a large amount of crime-related statistical data in graphs and almost 3,000 .csv files. This is not unlike the LulzSec hack of the Arizona Department of Public Safety in 2011 which turned over a large amount of "law enforcement sensitive" data which was not exactly secret.
Identity Finder found no data containing any sensitive identity-tied information such as social security numbers, credit card or bank account information, or driver license information.
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