Anonymous Steals 10,000 Iranian Government Emails

Several readers have sent word that Anonymous has hacked servers belonging to Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, making off with over 10,000 emails. "The Ministry’s website is still down as of this writing, and the servers are under Anonymous control. ... The email archive includes approvals and rejections for a variety of visas and passports, among other requests and correspondence. 'It’s near the election’s anniversary. We had to do something,' said one of the Iranian members of Anonymous from #OpIran. He said they take down Iranian government servers on a regular basis for operation days, but that obviously retrieving information required a different approach to the group’s signature DDoS attack. He also indicated an as-yet unannounced attack. 'For the election’s anniversary, we have a complete DDoS attack day' planned, he said.

Comments

A la Gibson

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm happy that Panther Modern basically exists now.

Re:A la Gibson

[pnewhook]

Not really. I'm getting tired of Anonymous' childish antics

Not so anonymous

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me see, so that would be CIA, NSA and Airforce cyber-command behind an astroturfed smokescreen of scriptkiddies...

LOLZ

Re:Not so anonymous

[Nikker]

I agree this is getting to be a bit much. Every time a wrist watch goes out of sync "Anonymous" gets the blame. It's just too easy for anyone with any motivation to say "ummm Anonymous did it!!". My guess is every country will be getting "hacked" under this guise because it's convenient and because well they want to stay anonymous ;) It will be even easier now to scare Joe Sixpack into going along with stupid laws because the internet is out to get them. Most of these companies get hacked not because of their status as a target but because of their amateur level of security standards. I'm surprised stuxnet didn't get blamed on Anonymous as well there would have been lots of lulz involved in that one.

Re:first

[toastar]

10,000 emails? What is that after you filter out the spam, like 50?

And now the bad news

[dkleinsc]

Unfortunately, what they had managed to acquire was just the last year's worth of lunch menus of all Iranian embassies.

Re:And now the bad news

[mangu]

Unfortunately, what they had managed to acquire was just the last year's worth of lunch menus of all Iranian embassies.

Even that could be a good propaganda weapon against the regime. Imagine if the menu included bacon and champagne.

Re:So this is a horrible, evil thing,

[teslafreak]

So some Americans are slanted against Iran, and your slanted against Americans. Hardly gives you any room to speak.

Re:So this is a horrible, evil thing,

[chill]

The Google hack targeted, among other things, the accounts of human rights activists which is what made it despicable.

Ironically Enough

[drpimp]

When I hit the /. story I got the following message below and I was curious if there were links to the email and Iran hacker #1 equal to 1000 hacker was retaliating

Error 503 Service Unavailable Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation: XID: 798461344
Varnish cache server

Re:Ironically Enough

[itchythebear]

I can also confirm this is happening to me. This is terrible, I've gotten so much work done :(

Re:Ironically Enough

[elrous0]

Clearly slashdot is just encouraging us to seek a guru, to learn meditation.

The conversation goes something like this

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

U.S.: Anonymous is completely rogue! They attack everyone utterly at random!

Anonymous: Not everyone, just the bad guys.

U.S.: What are you talking about? You've been attacking us, too.

Anonymous: *cocks eyebrow*

Re:The conversation goes something like this

[ErikZ]

I think you've summed up every society that has ever existed in a nutshell.

Re:The conversation goes something like this

[VortexCortex]

humorous and insightful but also serving to underscore the problem. When you trust a group of people to pick and choose your good and bad guys for you, and that group has no accountability...

Ah, a group like say, your own government?

FYI -- Anonymous is the anti-thesis of the "group" of which you speak. They can't choose a bad guy for you, they can't even choose a bad guy for themselves. What they can do is cooperate with each other if&when the individuals' ideas of who the bad guys are happen to be aligned.

The fact that so many individuals attempt to hide behind the name Anonymous in order to make trouble for the traditional groups who decide your bad guys for you is very telling indeed.

it's like distributing loaded guns in your local preschool then telling the preschoolers to all work together in picking out the bad guys before anyone pulls the trigger. Sometimes, they'll get it right.

Yes. Invariably, if you hand them guns they'll shoot the ones that molest and abuse them. A few accidental deaths may occur, because they are too inexperienced -- but the others would quickly take note of the consequences.

Additionally -- this is a bad analogy, because a single member of Anonymous has very little power, much less than a child with a gun. It would be more like giving them small stones and sticks. Alone the child can not truly harm the adult abusers, but in numbers they can -- Hint: the number of children that lash out are proportional to the number of children, friends, and family that have been abused.

Re:The conversation goes something like this

[MikeBabcock]

There's a reason being a vigilante is often illegal. While we revere our comic book super heroes acting this way, the total lack of supervision and accountability makes even the nicest vigilante dangerous to human rights and civil liberties.

Yes, the police often ignore those too, but they actually have someone keeping records, and if they don't, those people have someone keeping records too. When you go to the polls, you don't get to vote out Anonymous. No matter how much they may attack something you actually value personally, Anonymous and other vigilante groups aren't about democracy. They're about their own form of totalitarianism.

That's right, when you decide your way is right and other should suffer for not agreeing with you, you've just become yet another totalitarian regime like Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Anonymous has no *right* to attack people, and we shouldn't celebrate them doing it outside the law even if they get the results you like. Some day it might be you they're coming after.

To rip off a famous poem:
When they came for the corporate overlords, I didn't stand up because I wasn't one.
When they came for the foreign governments I didn't say anything either, because I wasn't one.
When they came for me ... *muffled scream*

Re:So this is a horrible, evil thing,

[Mindcontrolled]

True, but who is hit by this hack? Visa and passport applications, amongst various other correspondence? Nothing of importance there, then, else they'd have mentioned it. Only the dealings of ordinary citizens with their government. Great act of resistance there.

I'd like to participate in a DDOS, but...

[t33jster]

I'm not sure about the consequences. We've seen/heard of FBI raids against DDOS participants when the target is Western financial services, but does law enforcement care at all when Anons mess with Iranian or other rogue states' sites? I'd imagine that the legality is the same in either instance, so it's really the response that I'm concerned with.

West vs East difference

[Script Cat]

Having would be kings squabbling to be in charge of your life -> western
Having an uncontested king undoubtedly in charge of your life -> eastern

Re:So this is a horrible, evil thing,

[DarkOx]

Plenty of Slashdoter's supported the wikileaks cable release. I think you find a general distaste among Slashdoters for big governments doing oppressive things even when its their own. I don't see the "Western Hypocrisy" at least among the main stream Slashdot crowd, which I admit is not exactly main stream.

And what does...

[itchythebear]

And what does the postmaster say about the amount of emails stolen?
"It's over NINE THOUSAAAAAAND!"
"WHAT?! NINE THOUSAND?"

Torrent.

[FooAtWFU]

Here.

Besides the obvious political angles, releases like these are probably a boon to academics doing work with text mining and the like. Public releases of email data sets have been hard to come by, something about "privacy". Of course, they're probably unlikely to all be in English, so your mileage may vary...

Re:So this is a horrible, evil thing,

[alendit]

Is the difference between goverment agencies (as in case of the "Chinese" hacking gMail) and loosly organised individuals really that hard to graps? Basically, it's "induvidual people attracking centrilised organisations = good", "centralised organisation attacking individual people = bad".

Btw, inb4 "goverments are made of people".

Re:So this is a horrible, evil thing,

[chill]

Maybe. If our State Dept. got hacked, people would freak out even if it was just a bunch of "where are we going for lunch" messages.

With luck, Anonymous will dump the load over to Wikileaks.

Re:encrypted archive

[chill]

Epic fail.

Quote the site:

The security of our proprietary process...

Tour data is fully sheltered by our unique encryption process.

Re:So this is a horrible, evil thing,

[chill]

Bullshit.

Arresting people for holding opinions and saying things that the government doesn't like is despicable. Just because those with guns make it a "law" doesn't make it moral or just.

(And no, I'm not talking about yelling "fire" in a crowded theater type speech.)

Putting people in jail, without formal charges or even notifying anyone outside the jail that they are being held is despicable -- even if it is the law.

Yes, there are laws that EVERYONE should be above -- if they had a brain and a backbone.

Re:So this is a horrible, evil thing,

[robot256]

No, what's despicable is that some individuals consider themselves to be above human rights, in the name of the law.

FTFY.

Photoshop anybody?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I think that a variant of the trollface, with a turban, "the Ayahtrollah", would be a suitable mascot for such activities.

Re:So this is a horrible, evil thing,

[Nadaka]

So... you think that hacking google, to get the login credentials and email history of human rights activists for the express purpose of identifying them and their associates so that they can be imprisoned or executed for daring to ask that people be treated with some basic human respect isn't evil?

War....

[steppin_razor_LA]

Spats between hackers and international corporations is one thing. When you attack a foreign government, that starts to get awfully close to war which is a matter for governments and not their citizens.

It is also easy to imagine military and intelligence agencies behind these sorts of attacks and hiding behind their citizenry as an excuse.

This sort of thing is going to continue to escalate and I predict that lives will eventually be lost..

Re:So this is a horrible, evil thing,

[mr1911]

Just like the Chinese hack on Google?

Not at all. One was a government attacking a private company. The other is a group of people attacking a government.

You may argue that the Anonymous attack is wrong, but the premise that the Chinese attacking Google is equivalent is incorrect.

If you are against the Western hypocrisy it would be more correct for you to prove China's innocence than for me to prove its guilt.

as opopsed to Team Themis taxpayer funded antics?

[decora]

we were basically paying whats-his-name, head of HB Gary, to go around running script kiddie stuff and fantasize about quitting his job and building an MMO.

  you can read about it in the anonymous dumps.