Anonymous hacks another US government contractor - Update

Anonymous's Antisec campaign is continuing, this time with the release – available as a torrent on Pirate Bay – of data from Booz Allen Hamilton, a US government technology contractor. The group claims the archive contains 90,000 military emails and hashed passwords and a 50MB "complete sqldump" of an unspecified database. The passwords were initially said to be unsalted MD5, but a later tweet said it was in fact SHA1 hashing with Base64 encoding.

The original announcement also says that the group's hackers found 4 GB of source code in an svn repository, took a copy and then deleted the original. Anonymous say their attention was drawn to Booz Allen Hamilton after the HBGary incident, as it bid for the same contracts as HBGary. It claims to have "uncovered all sorts of other shady practices by the company, including potentially illegal surveillance systems, corruption between company and government officials, warrantless wiretapping, and several other questionable surveillance projects", but does not appear to have released any information pertaining to these claims. It does though offer a $310.00 invoice to Booz Allen Hamilton for "an audit of your security systems".

Booz Allen Hamilton's only response, a tweet saying that it does not comment on specific threats or actions taken against its systems. Booz Allen's stock price fell 2.27% on the news.

The attack on Booz Allen Hamilton follows last week's attack on IRC Federal. Anonymous announced that attack on Pastebin and distributed a 107MB RAR archive on Pirate Bay. They also claimed to have defaced the company's web site and "dropped their databases and private emails", in the process finding login info for various VPNs and "several Department of Energy login panels". IRC Federal's web site is still offline.

Update - Booz Allen Hamilton has now, uncharacteristically, confirmed that "the posting of certain data files on the Internet yesterday was the result of an illegal attack" and that the company is conducting a review into the "nature and extent of the attack". It currently believes that the attack did not go further than "data pertaining to a learning management system for a government agency". The company said it was giving confirmation in light of the publicity surrounding the event.

(djwm)