Anonymous hacks Iranian government servers, steals email

The recent threat of persecution by NATO officials doesn’t seem to be doing much to slow down the operations of hacker collective Anonymous.

This week, members of Anonymous have reportedly hacked into and gained control of Iranian government servers, and made off with a 10,000 message email archive belonging to the nation’s Ministry of Foreign affairs.

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Those emails have now been published on BitTorrent, and contain passport scans and personal information of foreign citizens who have applied for visas to travel to the country. It also includes approvals, rejections, and other departmental correspondence.

According to an Iranian Anonymous member, the attacks are occurring now because it is close to the June 15th anniversary of the 2009 Iranian presidential election which came under fire for suspicions that the results has been rigged by the government.

“It’s near the election’s anniversary. We had to do something,” the Anon operative told Joel Falconer of TNW.

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The server hijacking is a different approach than the LOIC DDoS attacks that have been the hallmark of prior Anonymous operations, including a mission last week which took down the official US Chamber of Commerce website. There is apparently more to come in #OpIran though, that will be more along the lines of what we’re used to seeing.

“For the election’s anniversary, we have a complete DDoS attack day,” the Anonymous member said, though the specific target of the attack was not named.

One striking detail to note about #OpIran is that the country’s government had to be completely blind or ignorant to not know that Anonymous would be striking against them. An Operation Iran open letter and press release have been openly posted online since as early as mid-February. As we have seen multiple times before, however, governments are often ill-prepared despite blatant warnings from Anonymous about impending attacks.

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