YEREVAN, February 6, /ARKA/. Personal information on some 4000 people in the banking industry, including bank officers, was posted online Sunday by the hacker collective Anonymous.
The list contains contact information on people with a range of job titles, from cashier to C-level officers to bank presidents, RBC reported citing Reuters and other news agencies.
The list also contains logins, hashed passwords and their “salts” — random characters added to a hashed password to make it more difficult to crack.
“That means they had to have very deep access to get those combinations,” Cameron Camp, a senior researcher with Eset, said in an interview.
Anonymous claims it filched the list from computers belonging to the Federal Reserve. The Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve did not respond to a request for comment.
“Breaking into the Federal Reserve just sounds like it would be above and beyond [Anonymous’s] skill set,” Jeffrey Carr, CEO of Taia Global and author of “Inside Cyber Warfare: Mapping the Cyber Underworld,” said in an interview.
If the list didn’t come from the Federal Reserve, where could it have come from? A common field in the data — CONTACTID — may offer a clue, according to Camp.
Camp noted that the exposed passwords, if used elsewhere by the people on the list, could allow for additional security breaches.
This latest move by Anonymous has been linked to its OpLastResort campaign, which was apparently launched in retaliation for the suicide of Aaron Swartz, an Internet pioneer and free information advocate. Anonymous, as well as some criminal justice and computer experts, believe Swartz was driven to take his own life by an overzealous federal prosecutor.
A week ago Anonymous launched the first phase of OpLastResort by attacking the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. After hijacking the site, the hacktivists threatened to release information pilfered from its servers unless the United States reformed its justice system. -0-
