Tek-Bull

Anonymous Donated Money to Charities from Stratfor’s Stolen Credit Card Numbers

Anonymous hacked again, this time in the spirit of Christmas – depending on who you ask. Anonymous claimed to have hacked into Stratfor, the American security firm, they then stole private credit card numbers, passwords, addresses, and emails from the firm’s clients.

Shortly after the hack, they delivered the payload via Twitter where the followers were asked to download the information. After the information was downloaded, unauthorized charges were made to the stolen credit cards – they donated gifts to charitable groups like the American Red Cross and CARE.

I’m sure that the owners of the credit cards are going to try and pursue Anonymous, but as far as the charity goes there can only be two outcomes for this:

1)    They can be douche bags and ask for the money back effectively ruining Christmas for someone.

2)    They can play the nice game and let them keep the charities.

Anonymous stated that Stratfor the – Super Awesome American Security Firm – failed at maintaining their client’s data by making a rookie mistake. They stated that Stratfor did not encrypt their data. This is something that even a fresh out of the oven security company should know about.  Since the attacks on Sunday the site has been under maintenance.

As far as how much information was stolen, Anonymous claims that they have information on the 4,000 Stratfor clients, and over 200 gigabytes of stolen information. Some of Stratfors main clients were the Defense Intelligence Agency, The US Air Force, Apple and even Microsoft.

Even though this sucks, at least Anonymous did something good with the stolen credit cards – in my opinion that’s not that bad considering how much money these agencies have.