Posted on July 19th, 2011Personal data of nearly 2.500 employees of Monsanto, an agricultural firm, has been made public by a famous group of hackers, Anonymous. On Wednesday, Naked Security reported that the private data of Monsanto employees and partners was revealed on Pastebin comprising their names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses.
A similar event had occurred previously when 90,000 password sequences and email addresses of military workers were leaked out when the federal contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton’s server was violated.
In a comment on the latest attack on the agricultural firm, which was called #OpMonsanto, Anonymous stated that for two days, it “blasted their web infrastructure”, “crippling all three of their mail servers as well as taking down their main websites worldwide.”
Based on a report by Information Age, Monsanto was described as the world’s biggest producer of genetically enhanced seeds and the vendor of largely controversial insecticide RoundUp.
The attack on the company started around two months before, when Anonymous revealed hundreds of documents specifying Monsanto’s “corrupt, unethical, and downright evil business practices.”
Anonymous has publicly stated that its next mission will be to, “open 6666 port on [Monsanto's] nexus server.” This clearly implies that the infamous group of hackers may be planning to develop an IRC channel on the compromised host, says Naked Security.
The report also declared that Anonymous has confirmed that its next objective is to target the oil giants Exxon Mobil, Canadian Oil Sands Ltd, ConocoPhilliops, Imperial Oil and the Royal Bank of Scotland amongst many others. They have affirmed that the mission will go by the name Project Tarmeggedon.
According to their statement, the purpose behind this particular operation is to protest against the Montana’s wilderness which is in the process of being transformed into an industrial shipping route to transport refinery equipment to the Alberta Tar Sands.
Anonymous acknowledged, “Anonymous now joins the struggle against ‘Big Oil’ in the heartland of the US. We stand in solidarity with any citizen willing to protest corporate abuse. Anonymous will not stand by idly and let these environmental atrocities continue. This is not the clean energy of the future that we are being promised.”
Various large corporations and government organizations have been targeted by this AntiSec’s mission who aims to reveal their slack security and humiliate companies which it feels are wide of the mark.