Hacktivists lift emails, passwords from oil biz in support of Greenpeace

Operation get behind the hippies

By John Leyden, 17th July 2012

An Anonymous cadre has hacked into major oil corporations' computers to protest against drilling in the Arctic.

The attack, dubbed OpSaveTheArctic, has led to the lifting of email addresses and encrypted password hashes for about 500 email accounts at five leading oil exploration corporations: Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP, Gazprom and Rosneft. Some of the leaked contact addresses have been added to Greenpeace's Save The Arctic petition page. Other hacktivists have been encouraged to spread the list.

The database raid by Anonymous was inspired by the Greenpeace campaign but it is not associated with the hippy organisation*.

"This Operation is carried out by Anonymous and isn't anyhow affiliated to GreenPeace! We are just supporting their cause," le4ky, the hacktivist behind the data dump, stated.

A manifesto for the operation was posted on Pastebin, but El Reg has declined to link to it because it contains private information that will be handy for phishing scams or worse.

Le4ky has offered to supply cracked MD5 hashes - the plaintext versions of the weakly one-way encrypted passwords - to interested parties. He claimed that the Exxon data slurp was not enabled by exploiting a vulnerability in its website but because of an unspecified mistake by its webmaster. ®

Peacenote

*It is official Greenpeace policy that all members of the organisation are required to be hippies, like it or not. Full details at the bottom of this article.

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