Cyber activists associated with Anonymous targeted a number of government websites late Friday afternoon, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the state of Alabama.
“CIA TANGO DOWN: https://www.cia.gov/ #Anonymous,” the group tweeted.
CIA spokesperson Jennifer Youngblood said the agency was “aware of the problems accessing our website” and was working to resolve them, which the CIA ultimately managed to do by Saturday morning.
Meanwhile, Alabama state officials confirmed that an unspecified amount of data was “compromised” during a hack and extract operation by the group.
To be sure, Anonymous posted a heavily redacted list containing the personal information of at least 500 individuals – and claimed to be in possession of their full names, Social Security numbers, license tag numbers, dates of birth and other sensitive data.
“We mean no harm by releasing this redacted information. This data was not securely segregated from the Internet, nor was it properly encrypted,” Anonymous explained in an online communiqué.
In other Anonymous related news, members of the collective downed multiple Greek websites administered by the Prime Minister, Ministry of Finance, police and Parliament. The group says it is protesting a series of harsh austerity measures recently approved by Greek legislators in response to the growing debt crisis plaguing the country.
“Anonymous is continuing their attacks against the Greek government, and will not stop until the people get what they want. If this does not happen Greece’s government will fall,” the group pledged in an online video.
“This is also a warning to all the other European Union counterparts. Italy, Spain, Portugal, Britain, Poland, and all the others will suffer the same fate as Greece’s.”
The above-mentioned attacks against various government websites were conducted just weeks after Anonymous managed to obtain a “sensitive” FBI-Scotland Yard conference call while jacking various police department sites, including those run by law enforcement officials in Syracuse (New York), West Virginia, Boston and Salt Lake City (Oakland officials were doxed).
The group also posted an e-mail archive related to the deaths of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians during a 2005 US operation in Haditha and raided Syrian government networks – extracting sensitive docs advising President Bashar al Assad how to handle the fallout over his bloody crackdown against protestors demanding regime change.
