Remember the Anonymous hackers behind the massive World Trade Center (WTC) leak? Well, he’s back with another breach and this time their target was the U.S. Census Bureau against TTIP/TPP.
On 20th July 2015, the online hacktivist Anonymous breached into the official website of U.S. Census Bureau, accessed trove of data belonging to the Bureau’s officials and ended up leaking it online — And the reason for doing so is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
Anonymous is Relatively Much Bigger Than You Anticipated
In an exclusive conversation with Anonymous, HackRead was told that the hacktivist group stands against the TPP/TTIP and it will support the hackers and protesters with the same mindset. Anonymous said it conducted this breach to hurt the U.S. officials.
“Getting into the Bureau’s site was a piece of cake, it was just a simple SQL injection can you believe and this will hurt a lot of people?”
For those who don’t know, The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a secretive, multinational trade agreement that threatens to extend restrictive intellectual property (IP) laws across the globe and rewrite international rules on its enforcement. While the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a comprehensive free trade and investment treaty currently being negotiated – in secret – between the European Union and the USA.
You can watch the video and learn the difference between TPP and TTIP.
Leaked Data:
The leaked data has been divided into four parts and after scanning the data, we have found following:
1: The first part contains the database of the U.S. Census Bureau’s website along with its password hashes.
2: The second part contains 3000+ usernames, IDs, phone numbers, full names and names of the agencies and most importantly thousands of email IDs belonging to U.S. official from the military, IRS, Census Bureau, Department of Home Security, US Department of Education, National Nuclear Security Administration and other high-profile U.S. government institutions along with their addresses.
3: The third part contains another folder of thousands of U.S. governments emails but this time it comes with additional usernames along with their clear-text passwords.
4: The fourth part contains 6700+ emails, names, phone numbers of the U.S. government officials along with their addresses and respective departments.
As per our analysis, the data is legit and never been leaked online in past. The data also shows that the admins working on the U.S. Census Bureau website have no interest in keeping the data secure or encrypted.
We are Anonymous, Expect us
The plain-text passwords on such a high-profile website show how the U.S. is vulnerable to simple as well as sophisticated cyber attacks, as the plain-text passwords can further be used to access other government based platforms.
The Anonymous hacker behind this attack previously hacked two major Israeli arms dealers/importers and leaked thousands of client login data online.
NOTE:
The hacker has requested us not to mention his Twitter handle for security purposes.
If you have any question about the latest breach feel free to contact us.
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