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

Re:first

[toastar]

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

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 :(

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

[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*

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,

[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: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.