HackersAntiSec hacks IRC Federal, posts passwords online
Last Friday, AntiSec, a prominent hacking group, announced that it had successfully infiltrated the servers of IRC Federal; the company has contracts with several major government agencies including the Department of Justice, the Army, Navy, and NASA; in an announcement on their website, AntiSec wrote, “We laid nuclear waste to their systems, owning their pathetic Windows box, dropping their databases and private emails, and defaced their professional looking website”
AntiSec logo stenciled on wall // Source: artificialeyes.tv
Last Friday, AntiSec, a prominent hacking group, announced that it had successfully infiltrated the servers of IRC Federal, a FBI contractor.
In an announcement on their website, AntiSec wrote, “We laid nuclear waste to their systems, owning their pathetic Windows box, dropping their databases and private emails, and defaced their professional looking website.”
The group said that it targeted IRC Federal for “selling out their ‘skills’ to the U.S. empire.” IRC Federal has contracts with several major government agencies including the Department of Justice, the Army, Navy, and NASA.
As of Tuesday, the company’s website remained down and the company refused to comment on the situation. A statement released by the company read, “We reported it to the authorities, and otherwise we have no comment.”
In a move that mirrored the tactics of the recently disbanded hacking group LulzSec, a loose affiliate of AntiSec, the group published portions of the data it stole from IRC federal online and even went so far as to post 107 megabytes worth of sensitive information on the file sharing site The Pirate Bay.
According to AntiSec, “In their emails we found various contracts, development schematics, and internal documents for various government institutions including a proposal for the FBI to develop a ‘Special Identities Modernization (SIM) Project’ to ‘reduce terrorist and criminal activity by protecting all records associated with trusted individuals and revealing the identities of those individuals who may pose serious risk to the United States and its allies.’”
The group said it also found login information for multiple virtual private networks (VPNs) along with Department of Energy “login access panels.” The group published all of this data in addition to “live ASP file browser and upload backdoors.”
The attack comes just a few weeks after a DHS Inspector General’s report found that IRC’s network was severely lacking in cyber security measures and could be vulnerable to attack. In particular, the report warned that many of the company’s databases that stored sensitive DHS data like citizen and defense information were improperly configured or running with known bugs. The company had recently spent $1.1 million to beef up its cybersecurity measures, yet auditors still found that nearly all of IRC’s 2,200 databases had serious security problems.
