Hackers Dump Millions of Records From Banks, Politicians

hypnosec writes "TeamGhostShell, a team linked with the infamous group Anonymous, is claiming that they have hacked some major U.S. institutions, including major banking institutions and accounts of politicians, and has posted those details online. The dumps, comprised of millions of accounts, have been let loose on the web by the hacking collective. The motivation behind the hack, the group claims, is to protest against banks, politicians and the hackers who have been captured by law enforcement agencies."

Comments

Great plan

[masternerdguy]

Yes let's ruin millions of innocent lives to protest the arrest of criminals!

Re:Great plan

[phantomfive]

I consider it a protest against bad security......

Re:Great plan

[jhoegl]

How do you know it is going to ruin lives when you havent even gone through it?
Perhaps it contains information that shows what we have been expecting all along, some of our senators are corrupt, they want to create laws to spy on everyone so that they can find people who know about them, and the same with corporations.
Wake up people, we live in a corporate run society, we are losing freedom in the false name of capitalism, we are losing our humanity to money.

Re:Great plan

[djnanite]

I consider it a protest against bad security......

And will you still be supporting their actions when you find your own personal bank details on that list?

Seriously - this just causes hassle for *everyone*, and is not a good way to drum up support for your ill-defined and unfocussed protest.

Re:Great plan

[Darkness404]

Exactly. The sort of nice thing about this is, its public. You can see, you KNOW if your account is breached, its really done in a non-malicious way. I'd much rather have my personal information leaked in a big leak like this than have some guy accessing my account and I have no knowledge about it.

Re:Great plan

[kiwimate]

How do you know it is going to ruin lives when you havent even gone through it?

Have you ever been through a car/motorcycle accident? I have - how can you understand it if you haven't? Of course, it doesn't take a personal experience to understand that a car running into you is going to hurt, probably break some bones, that kind of thing.

It's not that difficult. You don't have to go through having your identity stolen to be able to understand the impact.

Re:Great plan

[Jane Q. Public]

"And will you still be supporting their actions when you find your own personal bank details on that list? "

Damned straight I would. That would give me direct evidence that my bank was not properly protecting my money, and give me very good motivation to start (or join) a lawsuit.

If the banks' security is shit, it's good to know about it. Better it be public than found by some criminal organization that will just steal it all and disappear.

Re:Great plan

[TarPitt]

Because Americans believe government regulation is bad and markets are good.

So instead of having job-killing freedom-strangling government regulations requiring better security, Americans wait until after their personal information has been compromised and publicly posted, then use the tort system to obtain economic compensation for the resulting damages.

Or they will until the tort system is crippled for killing jobs and crippling free enterprise.

Re:Great plan

[Nutria]

This is the critical point: American jurisprudence is designed to be reactive, not proactive.

Re:Great plan

[Jane Q. Public]

"This is the critical point: American jurisprudence is designed to be reactive, not proactive."

Yes, it certainly is. It inherited that (as did many other countries) from European Common Law. It's not like that's unique or even unusual.

Arguably, that's the way it should be, in a society that promotes freedom over government control.

Re:Great plan

[arfonrg]

Because lawsuits costs money... It takes THOUSANDS of dollars to pursue a civil suit and most people can't afford it. On top of that, class action suits are usually brought about by a lawyer(s) who really could care less about justice and care more about taking a percentage of the gains so, they take a gamble.

It's not a fair system but, it's better than nothing and could be much worse.

LAWSUIT RULE 1: The only people who win are the lawyers.

Re:Great plan

[Sarten-X]

"No true communist state has ever existed" is not a No True Scotsman fallacy.

No True Scotsman is where the experimental grouping is based on the results of the experiment. As a more obvious example, consider giving all of the participants in a drug trial the same medication, then splitting them up afterward based on whether the drug worked or not. In the had-a-good-effect group, 100% of the trial patients had a good effect! Amazing!

The classification of political states, however, is a different issue. No true political anything has ever existed. Dictatorships aren't true dictatorships, because the dictators don't directly control absolutely everything for everyone. Communism isn't true communism, because the people making decisions have always been held in higher regard than the people making toilets. Capitalism isn't true capitalism, because there is always regulation and corruption getting in the way of an informed public. Monarchies aren't really monarchies, because there are always parallel power structures that don't fall into the nicely-defined hierarchy.

The fallacy here (for which I do not recall a proper name, and can't be bothered to look it up) is a confusion (intentional or not) between ideals and realistic implementations of systems. It's easy enough to say "in a Communist system, everyone is valued equally," but much more difficult to actually convince a nation of people to consider everyone perfectly equal. The ideal, however, does make for an interesting philosophical discussion, just as the real implementation makes for an interesting sociological discussion. With the insights from both, perhaps a political system can be devised that accomplishes the goals of the ideal system, while accommodating the pitfalls of the real implementation.

Re:Great plan

[girlintraining]

As someone exterior from the US, there is something I don't understand... What do people wait to file a class action to protest against bad security in banks ?

Ignoring the grammar, it would be because the US Supreme Court deleted citizens' ability to join class action lawsuits because it cost corporations too much.

Re:Great plan

[neonKow]

My favorite piece of advice I've ever heard about riding: "Ride as though you are invisible and everyone else is drunk."

(Also applies when trying to drive a vehicle of any sort in the DC area.)

Re:Great plan

[psiclops]

so i'm guessing you'd be glad that it was released publicly, otherwise well - you wouldn't have known to call your bank.....

Re:Great plan

[SydShamino]

The SCOTUS ruled that clauses slipped into contracts prohibiting class action lawsuits are valid. In other words - there are some rights that you can't give away in a contract, but the right to join a class action lawsuit isn't one of those.

Now, some companies have already started changing their one-sided take-it-or-leave-for-our-competitors-oops-they-all-have-the-same-clause contracts to include a waiver of the right to participate in a class action lawsuit. The argument is that all companies will do this soon, as there's little reason not to, and that will thus block most citizens from joining class action lawsuits.

The problem here is that SCOTUS was wrong. The right to redress in court is one right that we shouldn't be able to sign away, and given how our court system is structured to so heavily favor the rich, class action rights should be considered a basic citizen right to redress.

Re:Great plan

[Jane Q. Public]

"Release a hack that shows ANY personal info should be a felony."

You are part of the problem.

Do you not realize, that it was lack of security on the part of the banks that allowed this to happen?

A lack that in many cases, was probably illegal?

By your logic, anybody who points out in public that your wallet is about to fall out of your pocket should be prosecuted.

Re:Great plan

[Jane Q. Public]

"If you rah, rah the hackers and then look forward to filing lawsuits against the company that got hacked then you must also be in favor in catching the people who perpetrated this crime and dealing with them in the legal system."

The "people who perpetrated this crime" were the banks that did not adequately protect their customer's information.

Other than that little difference, I agree with you.

Re:Great plan

[Anonymous Coward]

We had 'free markets' in the 1800s. It only allowed unbridled corporate greed and massive amounts of worker exploitation and pollution.

Re:Great plan

[Doctor_Jest]

No, we had no free markets in the 1800's. That's a myth. A free market doesn't mean a market without rules. It means a market without manipulation. Read Adam Smith or F.A. Hayek. (And before the Kensyians jump in with their nonsense... Just give it a shot.)

It's enlightening...

Security

[DevotedSkeptic]

Banks got billions in bailout but apparently put none of it into security. Like the bailouts the Banks and politicians win and the consumers lose.

Something like this was bound to happen...

[dryriver]

The powers-that-be, which includes banks, corporations and lawmakers, have been driving all of us "ordinarylings" towards a future where we are increasingly under 24/7 surveillance, whether we like it or not. They have been building a "surveillance grid" that becomes more sophisticated every day, and that knows everything from what we are buying/consuming, to what we are reading, to where we surf on the net when we get up in the morning, to where we park our cars, or go for an evening walk. ---- In a sense it is almost fair that the people who have been encouraging & bankrolling & constantly expanding this surveillance grid get their own digital lives hacked, and thrown online for everyone to scrutinize. ----- If we weren't surveilled digitally, 24/7, and so cruelly, I would say that these hackers have done "a bad thing". ------- Things being what they are - we are watched every more closely by the surveillance grid - its hard, morally speaking, to blame these hackers for their unorthodox actions and tactics.

Cool, that'll show 'em

[kiwimate]

Score against banks - a bit of a headache, some minor bad P.R., a temporary drop in share price maybe. Don't worry, it'll come back up when the next scandal pushes this one off of people's memories.

Score against the people they're standing up for (the public) - millions of lives ruined as their credit goes to pot, countless hours and days of effort spent to try and recover, thousands of dollars of extra interest payments now their credit score has been dropped down, potential bankruptcies and divorces and split households from the stress...

What a bunch of jackasses. Maybe these people should think who they're really hurting once in a while.

Re:Cool, that'll show 'em

[LMariachi]

How would this lower anyone’s credit rating? Unless they’ve been lying to creditors about their assets/income, in which case their credit rating ought to take a hit.

Re:Cool, that'll show 'em

[Jane Q. Public]

"Score against banks - a bit of a headache, some minor bad P.R., a temporary drop in share price maybe. Don't worry, it'll come back up when the next scandal pushes this one off of people's memories."

Not really. This publicly humiliates their "security" measures. In many cases, they are probably breaking Federal security laws. If I were among those affected, I would try to start or join a class action suit.

"Score against the people they're standing up for (the public) - millions of lives ruined as their credit goes to pot, countless hours and days of effort spent to try and recover, thousands of dollars of extra interest payments now their credit score has been dropped down, potential bankruptcies and divorces and split households from the stress..."

Again, not really. Would you honestly rather have had somebody discover all this in secret, and run off with all the money they could finagle out of it? And not be discovered for months or years later?

Or would you rather have it public, so that The People know about it and can take action against it?

No, you are quite wrong. This WAS the right thing to do.

Re:Cool, that'll show 'em

[DarwinSurvivor]

Identity theft.

Re:No.

[VortexCortex]

I disagree. While I completely understand what you're saying, I think that we should be associating every breach of law with Anonymous. In the short term it makes the name seem more powerful, and the police state can convince us it needs to limit more freedoms to catch members of Anonymous. Over the long term it points out the ridiculousness of hunting down anyone as a "terrorists" simply by labelling them "Anonymous".

Look, it's going to get worse before it gets better. I'd have rather had a better name to rally under when the time comes for that, but one makes do with whatever planet one's on, eh? The sooner it's made apparent to the common folk that "Anonymous" means "average citizen", the better.

Are you now or have you ever been a member of Anonymous?