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Anonymous Hacks US Think Tank Stratfor
Frankie70 writes "At 11:45 PST on Christmas Eve, hacking collective Anonymous disclosed that not only has it hacked the Stratfor website (since confirmed by Friedman himself), but has also obtained the full client list of over 4000 individuals and corporations, including their credit cards (which supposedly have been used to make $1 million in 'donations'), as well as over 200 GB of email correspondence."
Go Anonymous!
I really wish they would stop doing that, the charities can end up eating a hell of a lot in chargeback fees when all is sorted out.
What's a Stratfor?
What happens the day that someone releases the names? What happens when some poor secretary who's name is on the list gets her details released to netizens without a social conscience. I understand that Stratfor are probably 'evil' from some of their recent actions, but if this activism is attempted then I hope that just a list of names isn't considered sufficient proof by and of itself of wrongdoing.
All I'm trying to say is that an itchy-trigger finger in obtaining information can lead to problems. I equate it to identifying downloaders by their IP, it's not sufficient proof and may be highly misleading.
Most people will go "Stratwho?", shrug their shoulders and go back to eating their turkey sandwiches.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
A netizen with a moral conscience! Employ remoralization agents!
Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.
So why would it be better when some random script kiddies, who have even less oversight than the TSA, do it for their own ends? When one group does something stupid or bad it does not magically become ok if another group does it.
I'm glad that you've decided that "an angry mob" qualifies as sufficient proof for any kind of retaliation. If a group of people (or who knows, maybe just one person, not like you know how many were involved) decides someone or something is "evil" that is all the justification needed to do whatever.
Seriously, what a shitty standard. You blame someone because a mob gets angry at them. Ok, so do you blame abortion doctors who get killed? After all, they have a mob of angry Christians after them, one of them angry enough to resort to killing. Guess they must be as evil as the Christians claim, since the "angry mob" standard is what you use.
See how bad that is?
Just like a billygoat crossing a bridge with snoring coming from underneath... don't stop to feed the trolls.
200 GB of data moving off their network didn't attract attention? I guess Global Intelligence in this case is an oxymoron.
So it's a for profit Intel company that feeds other corps so that they can better plan their financial moves around World issues, along with "other things".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratfor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Friedman
Full Client list: http://pastebin.com/8MtFze0s over 20k hits
Some clients:
AEG Partners LLC
FOX news
AIG Financial Products
American Airlines
American Express
Blackwater Security Consulting
Wells Fargo Investments
Yawn.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Normally don't but just had to this time. Merry Christmas!
Same back to you, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa, Oi Saturnalia, and enjoy your neo-pagan festival.
Namely, stop fucking with people who aren't afraid to track you down and kill you over 'lulz'. :)
I love how Anonymous hates on everything related to the US, the West, police, etc., and utterly ignores things like China jailing or disappearing human rights activists, Beijing requiring bloggers to register their real names, or the over 5,000 people the Syrian government has murdered this year, instead posting tired, lame anarchist diatribes predicting the downfall of Capitalism.
I hope that Anonymous one day gets what it wishes for, if only so they could witness how horrible that world would be.
We are Anonymous. It is not possible to shut us up or kill us all. If you cut a head off, two more will grow back.
That's quite poetic. However in reality *you* are quite fond of *your* head and will cry, beg, turn over the names of others, share everything you know and will help setup stings to discover others when really bad guys lay their physical hands on you.
Don't underestimate your enemy. Don't overestimate yourself.
Wow, two links about the same topic from two years ago?!
Tell me, who has Anonymous, in practice, targeted most?
Is that because the US is the most evil?
Or is it because Anonymous is populated by a bunch of immature, privileged know-it-alls who have the erroneous but common belief that the US, and to a lesser extent, any form of law enforcement or authority in a free society, is what's wrong with the world?
Sure, you can cherry pick examples. Just like when Wikileaks launched, it said its "primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East", and instead turned into an anti-US extravaganza.
Anonymous doesn't have the balls to go after the true oppressors and tyrants. Just a bunch of script kiddie equivalents who troll for targets that aren't properly secured, find them, then act as if they can hit anything, and post a bunch of verbal vomit alongside the hack.
How we react to this should be independent of our feelings about Stratfor. I recall a breaking at a a certain hotel Watergate which upon discovery, had drastic consequences for its perpetrators . Why should we stop to congratulate these guys for breaking in any organization?
You insensitive clod!
A security think tank conveniently leaves a treasure trove of information completely un-encrypted and don't notice the huge transfers of data from their servers. Any chance that it might be a trap?
Some "clients" also include "retired", "none", "self", "self-employed" and "University of Missouri" 9 times. Several companies are repeated dozens of times. This isn't a corporate client list, this is a list of companies the individual clients work for. There's also several news organizations listed including AP, Reuters, FOX News, NBC News and MSNBC.
You forgot Festivus.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I'd be much more impressed if they took on a genuinely dangerous opponent, like the cartels they threatened (and then pulled away from...)
Lost some respect for Anon following that episode.
It is _NOT_ ballsey or fear-inspiring to take down a think-tank.
Ok mods. I usually ignore it, but how is this getting modded down for "troll"?
Stratfor put out briefs that said pretty much exactly that. Specifically that Anonymous was playing with fire with going against the Mexcian cartels and were not a significant threat to them. Also, they rated the wikileaks cables as causing embarrasment, but not changing the way that diplomacy is done in the world.
Is there something else? I've seen some speculation, but nobody has really posted anything about what ticked off anonymous. If you know, enlighten us.
The members of Anonymous speak English; not Chinese.
Also, as wikileaks shows the USA and its corps are one of the major forces for evil in the world today (including all those years of Bush;) at least they are not wasting time attacking international charities or are making millions with scams (well who knows it they are doing that too.) What is funny is how people complain about them not doing enough illegal acts against X. Let X be any disliked organization generally exempt from responsibility.
I'm glad they generally pick on those who need it and can afford it. From a security standpoint, too many do not do enough and are in a situation where proper security matters; without the attention it would only be the Chinese government hacking them (and not making it publicly known.) To some degree such attacks strengthen the victims; other than possible long term political fall out.
As I recall, Stratfor said there were no WMD in Iraq right before we invaded because other people said they had WMD.
So perhaps I missed the point here.
Pedantic, I know -- but in the U.S., think tanks are generally not-for-profits set up to do research and advocacy. Stratfor is a for-profit business.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
What the hell did Stratfor do do deserve this? And why steal the CC's of a people who are interested in good quality analysis of current vents and the news behind the news? What "evil" did they do?
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
And, on the same site the hack info was posted, we have a denial that it was anonymous. Of course, since it's anonymous, there is no way to verify it. And, of course, if you have no membership, how can you say that someone isn't a part of anonymous?
http://pastebin.com/8yrwyNkt
So, someone says yeah we did it. Someone else says no we didn't it was other people.
Pass the popcorn.
Justice is to be doled out by a disinterested third party. Proportionality and scope are key in the concept. Angry mobs tend to go overboard on both.
Who gets to say who is right or wrong? In a republic, we all do when we vote for our representatives. We vote when we buy products a la Adam Smith's Invisible Hand economics. We vote when we consume internet media with ads or contribute money to causes.
I don't think Anon is wrong in what it does. There is a place in the world for rebels. Just don't glorify what they do. What they serve is not justice. It is retaliation. And that's mob rule.
The purpose is clear for retaliation: deterrence. The Torah states that punishments should deter wrongdoers in our society ("and you shall eliminate the evil from your midst," Deut. 19:19) Does hacking an organizations mail servers and exposing it's members (who may themselves have done nothing wrong) serve that purpose?
Martin Luther King, Jr. said: "The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind." Let the blinding begin.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
And thank you for the Xmas gift of exposing and attacking some of the most criminal corporate organizations on the planet.
Next Stop I hope is the RAND Corporation.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Could anyone of the slashtards claiming that Stratfor is evil actually explain why? With like, examples?
This site is going down the drain. It's just a bunch of teenagers masturbating to hacker fantasies.
Sad.
You evidently accidentally clicked the "Anonymous Coward" checkbox, so alas you have not stood to be counted at all :-(
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
"Who gets to say who is right or wrong? In a republic, we all do when we vote for our representatives."
I didn't sign up for that when I was born. Fuck you. Keep on votin' pansy.
"Who gets to say who is right or wrong? In a republic, we all do when we vote for our representatives."
I didn't sign up for that when I was born. Fuck you. Keep on votin' pansy.
You can vote with your feet too, little man. Pansy here says "Buh-bye."
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
This was reported on Zero Hedge last night and there was a link to the cached version of the hacked page on Google.
I've obviously heard about Anonymous before but never paid much attention to them. The crap that they posted on the hacked site makes me question what they are all about. It was a whole bunch of socialist crap about capitalism being bad, and communes being good. They had some videos where they showed the Occupy Oakland protestors destroying some windows at Wells Fargo. There was a long winded diatribe (tl;dr) basically encouraging people to engage in whatever fraud they can get away with because it will hurt the system.
Now I realize just how out of touch with reality these kids are. They do not have a constructive message. They do not have any plan or ability to actually make things better. All they want to do is whine about "how bad things are". It is clear that they are just a bunch of retards on the internet. Anarchists in black? Digital vigilantes?
All I see in Anonymous is another example of the collapse of society. All they are doing is hastening the downfall, without offering anything constructive to replace the current system with. Boo hoo hoo, capitalism sucks. We have roofs over our heads and when we can't find a job, we have the welfare state to fall back on to keep us fed and off the streets. Fuck the system man, it's keeping us down. It's making us BUY all of this shit. Cry me a fucking river.
There is a major shit storm coming. Anonymous, OWS and all of those people think that they are on the "right" side of the battle line. When it comes down to it, the fact of the matter is that America as a country kicks ass. We are blessed with natural resources and more food than we need. We have so much food that we can export it to poorer countries. Our economy kicks so much ass that half of the country can not pay taxes, yet still get fed and housed. There are a bunch of corrupt assholes at the top of the food chain, but tell me how that is any different from any other point in history. It isn't.
In Anonymous I see a bunch of greedy, spoiled, whining kids. They are upset because they do not have what they believe they are entitled to. So they are going to go around and fuck things up because they can. It shows how lame and out of touch they are. Society is fragile. It always has been, and always will be. It always takes more energy to build things up than to tear them down. It takes more effort to keep things going, than it does to get in the way and fuck things up.
That's not very hard due to the lack of deadlines. The appropriate comparison would be books or papers by experts instead.
The very idea that the same person can be a world class expert on tobacco, nuclear power, coal chemistry, global warming, social security and health insurance should ring alarm bells in the head of everyone with the minimum standard of education.
I am just not getting the logic of this attack. Theoretically they're doing it as part of the Free Bradley Manning campaign. But who, that can actually help Bradley Manning gives a fuck about Stratfor?
Stratfor is what you use if you don't have a lot of resources. If you're some guy who follows foreign affairs a Stratfor subscription is great. If you're an Army Officer, who can call up a very experienced intelligence analyst at division HQ (he's called the G1), read every State Department memo ever written, etc. it's just not that useful. It could conceivably be useful as a check against groupthink (IIRC they were quite a bit more skeptical of Chalabi then Dubya was, for example), but that's about it.
Manning, OTOH, is a Private who is charged with giving away information that could potentially endanger US Troops. This includes disobeying orders. There are no US Army Officers anywhere who think helping out a possible check on groupthink is worth relaxing discipline. It's just not gonna happen.
What a bunch of wanna-be's. What do you call a bunch of script kiddies with nothing worth while to do? Anonymous.
Stratfor is an information company. They provide information. Remember the huge, violent protests in Bangkok a while back? If hard drive companies, or companies reliant on hard drives, wanted to know the possible repercussions of those protests, they would probably turn to a company like Stratfor, Jane's, or the Economist, for analysis by experts. "Would the current government fall? Would the military take over again? How likely is it that our factories and supply lines would be effected?"
That's all Stratfor does. They provide information and analysis. What their clients *do* with that information is the clients' responsibility.
Anonymous is basically trying to silence an information source.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
"What they serve is not justice. It is retaliation. And that's mob rule."
It's not retaliation if there's nothing being retaliated against.
Apparently one of the companies mentioned in the release is Doctors without Borders. I suppose a charity that provides medical care in war-torn regions and disaster areas finds it useful to have access to information and analysis of political and military situations in the regions where they are active.
What, exactly, is Stratfor supposed to have done that merits retaliation, if their service is useful to a group that does heroic work for people in the worst possible situations?
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
Stratfor (short for Strategic Forecasting) is not some secret, exclusive operation. Anybody can subscribe to them. You can even get free reports via email. They offer analysis on issues that are global in scope - security, energy, economics, politics, whatever. And, oh yeah, they actually admit it when they get an analysis wrong or didn't see something coming. I've been a subscriber to the service for several years now. I don't work for an energy company or a multinational corporation. I am an individual who wishes to get rational, pragmatic insights on issues that concern me - and I want minimal bullshit in my insights. IMO, I think these guys do a reasonable job - way better than FOX, CNN, or the standard networks. During the Iraq war, when all the major networks were cheerleading, these guys were trying to determine what may have been motivating that sequence of events; speculating about potential ways the war would be carried out; counter-strategies from Iraq; impacts of the war on the regional and global balance of power. They're not liberal, they're not conservative, they're not libertarian. They are essentially a private intelligence service. The point of this rant is that Stratfor does good work. I subscribe to them because they try to provide an informed, dispassionate perspective that is currently absent from the mainstream news networks. And it pisses me off that some jackasses would hack them.
Nice.. now 'evil' banks are going to make $70k in profit from charge back fees off those innocent charities . Thanks Anonymous! Oh btw, how about actually doing something worthwhile like going after those drug cartels in Mexico... oh, that's right, you pussed out on that like the f*cking cowards you are...
there are two very interesting stratfor articles that bear direct relation on his case, one from circa 2001, one from circa 2010, both pointing out the laughable nature of our 'classification' system, and the way it breeds bureaucracy and political infighting, rather than security. when everything can be classified, even innocuous memos, then the whole point of classification loses its meaning in the first place. instead of becoming about security of critical information, it becomes about power brokers exploiting their security clearances to one-up each other and keep people out of loops.
i forget the names of the articles but if you google them you can find them.
You seem to have this idea that "Some of their customers are people I don't like, so that makes them evil." His point is "Some of their customers are very altruistic organizations so try again."
You are doing what many on Slashdot have done and automatically assuming Stratfor is evil. This is in part because you are probably a general anti-corporate type but also because you falsely seem to assume that Anon are a bunch of really great guys that do nothing but good. So you decided that Stratfor HAD to be evil, and now are trying to justify it.
Note to self: change password from potrzebie
These places pretend to sell "experts" on anything you want at the moment - lacking anyone in the field you are after some recent graduate or interning undergraduate in something completely different will give it a go. That's fair enough if somebody with an actual clue is backing it up, but these places are far too small for that.
The odds are whatever you get will be wildly out of context or even completely made up. You just cannot trust anybody if you have nothing but their own word to tell you how good they are.
Sooner or later they will drum up enough information on these peeps and start tossing them into a bottomless pit. ...
As someone who has their e-mail address is in the Stratfor database, not only were they hacked, but the hackers then sent out an e-mail on Christmas Eve posing as the founder of Stratfor to the entire user base (guessing it was to all of us), which is probably how the hack itself was discovered. It was a strangely formatted e-mail with a single but very long column of text formatted to slowly move the text from the left side of the page to later in the e-mail it being on the right and just a single word per line. I'm posting only a small excerpt here since I'm not sure what the hell it really is and it may be copied from a private or copyrighted work that was not to be distributed (not to mention the Slashdot filters on comments did not like all the whitespace so I had to go with just a small snippet from the beginning of the e-mail):
Subject: Stratfor's final intelligence bulletin: 'The Coming Insurrection'
Date: December 24, 2011 7:52:49 PM CST
First Circle: “I AM WHAT I AM”
Second Circle: “Entertainment is a vital need”
Third Circle: “Life, health and love are precarious — why
should work be an exception?”
Fourth Circle: “More simple, more fun, more mobile, more
secure!”
Fifth Circle: “Less possessions, more
connections!”
Sixth Circle: “The environment is an industrial
challenge.”
Seventh Circle: “We are building a civilized
space here”
GET GOING!
FIND EACH OTHER
GET ORGANIZED
INSURRECTION
comité invisible
The Coming Insurrection
From whatever angle you approach
it, the present offers no way out.
This
If you cannot be identified, you cannot be held accountable. Accountability works both ways in that supporters or detractors can understand what to hold them responsible for. Obviously support for this action was far from an overwhemling majority and unfortnately when you operate under the premise of collection conciousness, you tend to include a lot of stupid people. If "anonymous" want's any sense of ligeitmacy, people need to be able to decern what actions were taken by the group and which ones were not. If this is not possible, anonymous is everyone and will be held responsible for all those who act like a pissed off bunch of 12 year olds lashing out hat everything they disagree with.
Being intrigued by their ideas, I've subscribed to Stratfor's free newsletter for years now. Its nothing more than news analysis and trend forecasting (of pretty good quality IMO). Their viewpoint tends to have the whiff of right wing imperialism but that is besides the point. They are not Blackwater or Haliburton. Its paid journalism. Since when is that unethical?
This was a pointless hack. Anonymous is guilty of childish posturing.
I'm an undergrad and polsci my major. I signed up for stratfor a few semesters ago since (1) their analysis is really pretty good and (2) it was helpful getting new perspectives on recent events when writing papers. My subscription has since expired, but this story actually got me pretty pissed -- esp. when I read that they "apparently" used the credit card info to make donations.
We all like it when Anonymous fucks with other people's shit, but now that their antics have started to directly fuck with my shit I can't help but wish ours or somebody else's government would shut them the fuck down. Renegade justice can be fun to watch and all, but there's a good reason why it's frowned upon.
I for one baked muffins for our benevolent alien overlords. Thank you for working to free the net.
http://pastebin.com/8yrwyNkt
Excerpt
"Emergency Christmas Anonymous Press Release
12/25/2011
THE STRATFOR HACK IS NOT THE WORK OF ANONYMOUS
Stratfor is an open source intelligence agency, publishing daily reports on data collected from the open internet. Hackers claiming to be Anonymous have distorted this truth in order to further their hidden agenda, and some Anons have taken the bait...."
Wait. I bet Doctors without Borders uses Windows too! Microsoft must be a saint!
"Fifth Circle: "Less possessions, more
connections!""
No, no. Ambassador G'Kar was Fifth Circle.
He wanted to carve the bones of the Centauri into toy flutes for Narn children and sow their fields with salt.
He calmed down a bit toward the end. Though he did strangle his best friend.
"I am the voice of today, the herald of tomorrow... I am the leaden army that conquers the world. I am TYPE." Frederic William Goudy.