“Anonymous”, the famous hacker group has made the headlines by breaching the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ security modules. Initial reports suggest that the hackers made away with the bank’s internal files as a strong response on behalf of the community’s anger at the Federal Reserve for its obscure policies and lack of transparency around several important things.

Security experts have been moved, or rather impressed with how the group executed its plan. Chris Wysopal: VeraCode Chief Technology Officer said that the hack attempt was a spearphishing bonanza and the most valuable account dump “I have ever seen”. Chris is not alone in expressing his concerns about this incident. Federal Reserve respondents, on the other hand, are saying that the hackers did not gain access to sensitive material. They did manage to secure some files, but most of the data was not compromised.

On the contrary, the Senior Information Security Consultant of a firm that specializes in providing online security solutions to internet based businesses said, “The Federal Reserve is simply incorrect by saying that there’s no account details on the list. I have seen the list in its entirety and it is absolutely rife with all the compromised details that have been leaked so far. Usernames and hashed passwords are included with salts.”

ZDNet authors wrote an article about this hack attempt. You can read it in details here. Federal Reserve security experts are maintaining their stance by saying that Anonymous’ claims are mostly overstated. Nonetheless, authorities and the FBI have been notified of the incident. They are investigating at the back end.

Some sources are saying that Anonymous core files that affected the Federal Reserve system were named after “Christopher Dorner”; the LAPD officer who was recently involved in triple homicide case. Dorner is still on the large as cops are looking for him all over the country. It is believed that Anonymous coincided with public opinion, which mainly hails the officer as an avatar of a man of conscience who was pushed to the point of desperate action due to the corruption happening within the LAPD.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2013 at 1:36 AM and is filed under Latest News, National News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.