The Finnish arm of the Hacktivist collective Anonymous announced their intent to wage a war against domestic mining company Talvivaara over the weekend, according to a press release posted to the Pastebin file sharing Web site on Saturday.
In what Anonymous has deemed “Operation Screw Talvivaara,” the group is aligning their objectives with the support of the overarching Operation Green Rights campaign. The new action is part of the group’s ongoing “Operation Valkomaa,” a campaign the group recently launched against the neo-Nazi Finnish Resistance Movement.
As part of that campaign, Anonymous was credited for hacking the website of the organization’s online news magazine, Kansallinen Vastarinta, early last week. That hack, as Threatpost reported, published the group’s membership application database to Anonymous’ Pastebin account.
The announcement follows news that the group leaked a list of 500,000 e-mail addresses and allegedly 15,000 potential passwords this past weekend. The contacts allegedly belong to officials from the Finnish police Poliisi, city councilors from Helsinki and members of the nation’s parliament, The Eduskunta.
Anonymous claims Talvivaara has grossly mismanaged how its mining affects the local environment, adding that work at its site in Sotkamo, in Eastern Finland, has exceeded the maximum emissions allowed by permits. The release also claims waste water from the mining site has leaked sodium sulfate into the lake, hydrogen sulfide is polluting the air and dust is turning snow black.
Earlier this year, in the midst of a handful of high profile hacks, Anonymous announced plans to target their Operation Green Rights campaign on big oil and biotech corporation Monsanto.
On Monday, Keskusrikospoliisi, Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation, said they were looking into the leak and urged the public to change their passwords on a regular basis, regardless of whether their e-mail addresses appeared on the leaked document.
