Anonymous Does ‘Italian Job’ Data Heist On Police

Hackvistist group Anonymous, along with their Lulzsec companions, have begun revealing sensitive information stolen from the servers of the Italian cyber crime unit, CNAIPIC.

CNAIPIC (National Computer Crime Centre for Critical Infrastructure Protection) is the unit responsible for guarding Italy’s critical national infrastructure, and the hacktivists’ attack appears to be a response to a number of arrests earlier this month of people alleged to belong to a hacker cell linked to Anonymous. Police conducted 31 raids across Italy and one in Switzerland.

AntiSec Campaign

The news of the hack was tweeted by AnyonymousIRC. The hack is said to be part of the hackvitists so called “AntiSec campaign”, which targets “corrupt organisations.”

“#AntiSec strikes at Italy Government. Silent no more,” said the tweet.

News of the attack was also revealed on hacker news websites, and links were provided to 8GB of files located on the website Pastebin.

“This is a pre-release of a series we are going to make to reveal the biggest in history of European LE cyber operation evidence exploitation and abuse. Thing’s gonna get published and twittered all over anonymous and lulzsec community,” the posting said.

“Today we were granted with the Italian law enforcement Pandora box, we really think it shall be a new era of “regreaissance” to the almighty Homeland Security Cyber Operation Unit in EU.”

“So we decided to leak everything they got since they were established as a full scale cyber taskforce named CNAIPIC.”

The group also mentioned the recent arrests.

“This corrupted organisation gathered all the evidence from the seized property of suspected computer professional entertainers and utilised it over many years to conduct illegal operations with foreign intelligence agencies and oligarchy to facilitate their lust for power and money, they never used obtained evidence to really support ongoing investigations.”

The group is claiming to stolen documents include information from the Egyptian Ministry of Transport and Communication, Australian Ministry of Defence, US Departments of Agriculture and Justice, and oil companies Gazprom and Exxon Mobil.

Similar Attacks

In June the website of the Spanish police force was knocked offline by Anonymous, following the arrest of three alleged members of the group.

Last month also saw the arrest of 32 suspects in Turkey believed to be linked to Anonymous, following an online protest against the country’s proposal for Internet filters. Anonymous then retaliated by hacking and defacing Turkish government websites.

Last week NATO said it was investigating claims that Anonymous had broken into its servers and stolen a gigabyte of data. Earlier that week a 16-year-old boy was arrested in South London and four more suspects were apprehended in the Netherlands as part of a US investigation into the activities of Anonymous.

“Let us remind you, FBI: Your threats to arrest us are meaningless to us as you cannot arrest an idea,” said a tweet by AnyonymousIRC.

Earlier this month Anonymous disclosed log-ins for 90,000 military employees as part of ‘military meltdown Monday’.

The attacks come after a top US official warned in early July that nation states are struggling to cope with the flood of cyber attacks.

The boss of GCHQ also recently warned it is losing cyber security ‘whizz kids’ to the likes of Google because it cannot match corporate salaries.