* Hackers: emails to be made public after being formatted
* Hackers affiliated with Anonymous group
Dec 27 (Reuters) - Hackers affiliated with the
Anonymous group said they are getting ready to publish emails
stolen from private intelligence analysis firm Strategic
Forecasting Inc, whose clients include the U.S. military, Wall
Street banks and other corporations.
Strategic Forecasting Inc, which is also known as Stratfor,
disclosed over the weekend that its website had been hacked and
that some information about its corporate subscribers had been
made public.
The hacking group known as Antisec has claimed
responsibility for the attack and promised to cause "mayhem" by
releasing stolen documents.
Antisec has already published what it claims are the names
of thousands of corporate and government customers, as well as
email addresses, passwords and credit card numbers of individual
subscribers to its services. Customers on the list published by
Antisec include Bank of America, Exxon Mobil Corp
, Goldman Sachs & Co, Interpol, Thomson Reuters
, the U.S. military and the United Nations.
Stratfor said in a letter to subscribers over the weekend
that it would offer identity theft protection and monitoring
services to affected subscribers. Its website has been offline
for several days.
Stratfor Chief Executive George Friedman said on the
company's Facebook page that the people whose names were
published by AntiSec had simply subscribed to the firm's
publications and did not have a deeper relationship with the
company.
Officials with Stratfor could not be reached on Tuesday to
comment on AntiSec's latest threat.
Anonymous said that the emails the hackers intended to
publish would be more sensitive.
"Stratfor is not the 'harmless company' it tries to paint
itself as. You'll see in those emails," Anonymous said via
Twitter.
The group said it would release those emails once it had
finished formatting them for distribution and prepared more than
9,000 "mirrored" copies. Creating that many copies of the file
would allow the hackers to distribute it more quickly and also
make it more difficult for authorities to shut down servers
holding the data.
A spokesman for the FBI declined comment on the matter.
U.S. federal agents arrested 14 people in July, charging
them with involvement in attacks on PayPal's websites in a
campaign organized by Anonymous.
Separately, a German expert on mobile phone security said
that flaws in the widely used GSM wireless technology could
allow hackers to gain remote control of phones and instruct them
to send text messages or make calls.
(Reporting By Jim Finkle in Boston; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
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