A new report from the BBC claims that Anonymous’s recent attack on The Sun’s website was more than the embarrassing defacement it appeared to be, and that in addition to posting a fake story, the group may have made off with the personal information of thousands of individuals that had entered into various competitions on that site.
The Sun’s publisher, News Group, told the BBC that the data was taken when the site was hacked on the July 19, and that they haven since reported the incident to both the police and Information Commissioner.
The report also claims that 14 applications for the 2010 Miss Scotland competition had been posted to the online file-sharing site, Pastebin. Among the stolen information are names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses and phone numbers, but no financial information or passwords were lost, according to the BBC. However, also among that information are in-depth biographies the women wrote outlining why they believe they should be chosen for the competition.
“I’m not happy at all,” one contestant who wished to remain anonymous told the BBC. “I’m kind of worried – because that is everything about me. [This data] should have been locked up, this was last year’s, so they didn’t need to keep my details.”
News Group’s parent company, News International released the following statement:
“We take our customer data extremely seriously and are working with the authorities to reslove this matter.”
As Threatpost recently reported, the Anonymous hacker-collective took credit for a compromise of the The Sun’s website in mid-July, wherein traffic was redirected to a spoof story claiming that the body of media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, had been found dead. The hack came on the eve of a testimony before the House of Commons by Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of The Sun’s parent company, News Corporation.
