The Anonymous hacking group has struck again, this time leaking a massive cache of emails belonging to Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and consulting firm that works with the U.S. government and military on defense and homeland security issues.
The leak, called "Military Meltdown Monday: Mangling Booz Allen Hamilton," includes 90,000 emails from military personnel, Anonymous wrote on the message accompanying the leak on the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay.
Departments that were affected in the Booz Allen Hamilton intrusion, according to the tech site Gizmodo, include US CENTCOM, the Marine Corps, Homeland Security and the U.S. State Department.
Anonymous cited Booz Allen Hamilton's alleged involvement in a controversial warrantless wiretapping program called Pioneer Groundbreaker as part of the reason for the cyberattack.
Booz Allen was also, Anonymous alleged, involved with creating software that would allow the military to manipulate social media sites in order to steer public opinion.
In the Booz Allen breach, Anonymous also leaked password hashes for each of the 90,000 stolen emails. Password hashes are random-looking numbers generated by an encryption algorithm; they can often be traced backward to uncover a user's login password.
(In this hack, Anonymous wrote that the hashes were "non-salted," meaning they didn't include an extra security protection — salting — designed to make backtracing more difficult.)
Of Booz Allen Hamilton's weak security system, Anonymous wrote, "So in this line of work you'd expect them to sail the seven proxseas with a state-of-the-art battleship, right? Well you may be as surprised as we were when we found their vessel being a puny wooden barge."
This network intrusion is the latest incident carried out in the name of AntiSec, an anti-government hacking campaign that has already sparked two breaches of confidential Arizona border police data.