Hackers calming to be part of the Anonymous hacking group dumped over 1.7GB of data slurped from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The data seems to be a collection of data from databases and emails from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/), which is responsible for publishing national crime statistics.
The dump is part of the Monday Mail Mayhem (#MondayMailMayhem or #MMM) operation that Anonymous has attempted to instigate for a few weeks, driving people to make it a regular Monday event. Presumably on a Monday to allow the hackers to show off their weekends work, week days being school days of course.
The departments response was pretty much a standard, we are not sure what is going on, “The department is looking into the unauthorized access of a website server operated by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that contained data from their public website”.
The accompanying Anonymous video states that:
“We do not stand for any government or parties, we stand for freedom of people, freedom of speech and freedom of information. We are releasing data 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. The price we pay very often is our own freedom. The price governments pay is the exposure of their corruption and the truth being revealed, for the truth will set us free in the end. So once more we call on you. Hackers, activists, and freedom fighters; join us in our struggle against these corporate hypocrites.”
See video below:
I am not sure how this relates to “government corruption”, as there does not seem to be much found in the data yet to suggest any form of government corruption at the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
More likely it was a drive by attack with a known exploit, after all .gov domains are pretty much under constant attack. They found a weakness, unpatched server, weak username and/or password, and they were in.
Embarrassing, Yes, “End of Government Corruption”, not so much.