FBI memo: The Anonymous group hacks US agencies though Adobe software
Last month, almost 3 million Adobe IDs got involved in a security breach by hackers, and Adobe made it clear to contact the federal law enforcement to assist in further investigation on the matter. Fortunately, the credit cards information remained encrypted. Meanwhile, at the same time Adobe noticed that there was some access to source codes of their software products and linked the two incidents as related. According to the FBI, however, the infiltration of the US Army, Department of Energy, and Department of Health and Human Services through Adobe software is only an episode of those breaches, as the hack-saga actually started back in December 2012 by a group widely known as the Anonymous. FBI memo reports that the Anonymous left back doors to the governmental computer systems in order to return later and finish the work. The matter went public last month with the Adobe software breaches, specifies the FBI. Investigators are still gathering information on the attacks that the authorities believe are continuing as some of the breaches and pilfered data in the latest campaign had been publicized by Anonymous, that are part of what the group dubbed ‘Operation Last Resort’.
Meanwhile, the FBI memo gave an instruction to the system administrators how to detect attacks but it can’t tell for certain extent of the damage. ‘The majority of the intrusions have not yet been made publicly known,” the memo read. “It is unknown exactly how many systems have been compromised, but it is a widespread problem that should be addressed. ‘The hacking campaign is associated with the Lauri Love case when the man was arrested and charged in October with hacking into systems of the US Army, the US Sentencing Commission, the Department of Energy, and other agencies.
Also, according to an Oct. 11 internal email from DoE Secretary Ernest Moniz’s chief of staff Kevin Knobloch, 104 000 government employees in the Department of Energy alone had their personal information stolen along with info on many bank accounts that officials were ‘concerned could lead to theft.
Source: Reuters
