Anonymous hacks Italy's critical-national-IT protection

Evidently the protection isn't critical

By John Leyden, 25th July 2011

Hacktivists have posted "secret documents" stolen from an Italian cybercrime unit.

The documents – 8GB of files – were extracted from a system maintained by the Centro Nazionale Anticrimine Informatico per la Protezione delle Infrastrutture Critiche (CNAIPIC), the organisation charged with guarding the country's critical IT infrastructure. In a message on Twitter announcing the release, Anonymous said it had received the files from an unnamed "source", prior to posting a sample of the files onto Pastebin. "#AntiSec strikes at Italy Government. Silent no more," it said.

The stolen documents reportedly include confidential data stored on servers that held evidence related to investigations as well as documents on the management structure of CNAIPIC and pictures of staff, among other files. Data on private firms including Gazprom and Exxon Mobil as well as foreign governments also appears to be among the cache.

Anonymous makes no direct mention on the motive for the attack, but it may well have been a retaliation to the arrests of alleged members of Anonymous in Italy earlier this month.

A story on the release can be found on The Hacker News here.

Hackers affiliated with the AntiSec movement have also hit GIS Austria, the Austrian TV licence fee collector. The organisation said 214,000 data files were swiped from its systems by Anonymous on Friday and that 96,000 of these had contained "account information". The hack is under investigation and affected customers have been informed. GIS's statement can be found here (in German). ®

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