FBI is circulating a memo that says hackers collective Anonymous has infiltrated data of The US Army, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services and several other government agencies.
Reuters reported that the campaign to steal sensitive information from the above-mentioned agencies started way back in December itself, with the hackers exploiting a flaw in Adobe software. The group also left "back doors" for themselves in the government computers so that they could sometime later return and exploit it once more.
The purpose of the memo by FBI was to raise awareness among the system administrators of the government agencies of the attacks and help them in identifying one.
"The majority of the intrusions have not yet been made publicly known. It is unknown exactly how many systems have been compromised, but it is a widespread problem that should be addressed," the memo warned.
It is suspected that data of 104,000 Department of Energy employees, contractors and their families have been stolen. The data also included the information of almost 2,000 banks, according to an internal email from Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. The figures of stolen data of other agencies are yet to go public.
Previously, the members of the Anonymous group had disrupted secure sites like PayPal after it stopped processing donations of the Wikileaks. Attacks against Sony Corp and security firm HBGary Federal were also in news for quite time.
The attacks, FBI suspects, are tied to the case of Lauri Love. Love is a hacker from UK who allegedly hacked NASA and some other state agencies' computers. Case of Aaron Swartz might also be linked to the operations. The famous Internet activist and RSS founder killed himself this year in January. Swartz was arrested for the charges of illegally downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR.
