Members of the loosely organized group conducting the AntiSec hacking campaign have compromised a company called IRC Federal, which does contracting for the FBI and other federal agencies, posting a large trove of information online in retaliation for what the group says is IRC Federal’s record of “selling out their ‘skills’ to the US empire.
The data supposedly belonging to IRC Federal was posted to the Pastebin site on Friday by members of Anonymous, one of the groups involved in the AntiSec hacking campaign. The company, based in West Virginia, was forced to take its Web site offline. IRC Federal is a contractor for a number of federal agencies and departments, including NASA, the Navy, Army, Department of Defense and Department of Justice.
The posting on Pastebin claims that the group used a SQL injection attack to gain initial access to the IRC Federal site, and then used a variety of other tactics to dump one of the company’s databases and email archive.
From the posting:
“In their emails we found various contracts, development schematics, and internal documents for various government institutions including a proposal for the FBI to develop a “Special Identities Modernization (SIM) Project” to “reduce terrorist and criminal activity by protecting all records associated with trusted individuals and revealing the identities of those individuals who may pose serious risk to the United States and its allies”. We also found fingerprinting contracts for the DOJ, biometrics development for the military, and strategy contracts for the “National Nuclear Security Administration Nuclear Weapons Complex”.
A spokesperson for IRC Federal told Riva Richmond of The New York Times that they had reported the attack to law enforcement and no further comment.
The attack on IRC Federal follows several other similar and seemingly related operations by Anonymous and other such groups, including the now-dormant LulzSec crew. The groups profess to share a common ideology and distaste for big business, government and authoritarian regimes. A similar attack on HBGary Federal earlier this year led to the release of a large number of company emails and other data and was apparently the result of an investigation into Anonymous by company executives.
