Shortly after the hackers with the AntiSec online activist campaign announced the release of about 90,000 military e-mail addresses and other data purloined from Booz Allen Hamilton, AntiSec followers on Twitter were anticipating a second data dump.
On Friday, AnonymousIRC tweeted it was Happy Hacker Independence Day and dumped information from IRC Federal, a contractor for the FBI and other government agencies, to celebrate their holiday with a F**k FBI Friday.
After 32 raids across Italy (and one in Switzerland), 15 alleged members of Anonymous have been arrested. The detainees, aged between 15 and 28 with five under 18, have been accused of performing denial of service attacks on Italian Web sites belonging to the government, and on both state and private broadcasters.
The Italian authorities are describing one of the suspects, a 26-year-old Swiss-Italian going by the monkier "Phre," as a "leader" of the hacking group. A further 30 suspects are still being sought.
Anonymous has played down the significance of the arrested suspects in Italy and Switzerland
Authorities continue their pursuit of Anonymous with a spate of arrests in both Italy and Switzerland. However the hacktivist group has played down the significance of those arrested.
On Tuesday various media outlets reported that Italian authorities had raided a hacker cell with links to Anonymous. Police apparently conducted 31 raids across Italy and one in Switzerland.
Police in Italy have launched a series of raids aimed at arresting the heads of the local Anonymous chapter.
Reports collected from local media claim that the authorities have carried out raids in Italy and border towns in Switzerland with the aim of dismantling the Italian activities of the hacktivist group.
Despite countless WikiLeaks copycats popping up since the secret-spilling site first dumped its cache of State Department cables last year, the new generation of leaking sites has produced few WikiLeaks-sized scoops. So instead of waiting for insider whistleblowers, the hacker movement Anonymous hopes that a few outside intruders might start the leaks flowing.
Looks like last week's "Chinga La Migra" strike against the Arizona Border Police was only part one—the sequel's landed today, and this time it's personal. Like, really personal: Anonymous is claiming social security numbers, girlfriend pics, and more.
The dumps contents—if they're authentic—will be a massive slap not only to the integrity of Arizona's state security, but the lives of its police force. Sayeth Anonymous, in "Chinga La Migra Communique Dos":
MasterCard's website is currently inaccessible following what appears to be a WikiLeaks-inspired internet attack against it.
In what appears to be the latest salvo by hactivists, the mastercard.com website is thought to be suffering from a denial-of-service attack - where an internet site is bombarded with a large amount of traffic making it impossible for genuine visitors to access it.
Anonymous has issued a beginner's guide to hacking online under the title, School4Lulz.
With the disbandment of hacker group LulzSec, the online 'hacktivist' collective is clearly looking for buddies to continue its fight under the banner Operation InfoSec - and one way of recruiting fellow travellers, it seems, is to issue them with a Hacking 101.
