Hackers Exposed Military And Government Accounts

Operation AntiSec is on its way, with more and more government services being compromised. Once again, nearly 17,000 e-mail accounts have been dumped to one of the file-sharing services a while ago. It appeared that the 1.18MB text file was posted by Connexion Hack Team, exposing government and military e-mail addresses and passwords. In addition, lots of popular e-mail providers can also be found in the list of leaked accounts.

It was just a few days ago that Connexion had dumped information from a California government online service. Apparently, now they’ve made another information dump. The Connexion Hack Team released a statement, saying that the emails and passwords were random, and refused to say which website they had come from. Those who suspect their emails to be contained in the list, are encouraged to check it by search, and if it is, to pick another address.

In fact, there are lots of government e-mails from everywhere, including e-mails from the NSA, Virginia, the DHS, and so on. To some of the users’ credit, they did have passwords containing a combination of letters, numbers and symbols, but there were not many of those. The most funny password was “changeme”, which the hackers commented “mega lulz”.

As for the military accounts, there were also a few of them containing a combination of symbols, which meant to take much longer to crack such a password. These were perhaps obtained in another way in this case.

Meanwhile, the rest of e-mails and passwords are all over the map, published in alphabetical order which, strangely enough, end on the letter “s”. It isn’t clear whether there’ll be a second dump or anything after the letter “s” is quite safe for now. Exposed domains include a lot of Yahoo and Spartans.nsu, as well as AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, BellSouth, Earthlink, Comcast, Sprint.Blackberry, vzpix, sbcglobal, Cox, Verizon, NSU, and many more.

It’s quite hard to know for sure how all of those emails were obtained, if you take into consideration that it was just a random smattering of addresses. Undoubtedly, such accounts will emerge somewhere else for people wondering if their accounts were exposed. Meanwhile, those who want to know it right now are free to download the whole list from MediaFire while it’s still up.

ACTA Might Harm National Security

The letter sent by the Department of Homeland Security said that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement turned out to be a potential national security risk back three years ago. 

One of the outfits following the ACTA development has received very interesting information over the agreement way back in 2008. When the treaty was first discovered, it was the worst that ever happened to copyright legislation. The agreement included a global “three-strikes” regime, which demanded that all digital devices including laptops and MP3 players be seized at borders and checked for infringing content. Moreover, it featured DMCA-style anti-circumvention provisions, and any negotiations over the treaty were entirely secret. It actually became known thanks to Wikileaks, which blew the lid off the treaty.

Ever since the information leaked online, there were many criticisms of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, one of them being that it represents a national security risk due to containing a “three-strikes” provision. France, which has already introduced the similar regime, was “yelled” at by the NSA for that. That’s what Homeland Security pointed out back then.

It turned out that the Department of Homeland Security sent a letter to the US ambassador, where it expressed concerns over the treaty negotiations. More specifically, the concern was about border security, or the priority IP Enforcement had as compared to other national security threats. The Department of Homeland Security asked where all the extra resources needed for seizing and searching all staff at borders would come from. What is more important, the letter was sent before the stock market crashed and the country considered tightening the belt. You can imagine what costs it would be today, if 3 years ago it was a matter of concern already. How does this relate to national security? Easy. Now ACTA would demand Homeland Security to do more with less resources, and if it tries to allocate all its resources to searching though every mobile phone and MP3 player at borders, then national security would be put at risk.

In other words, it looks like there’s a choice between huge national security risks and counterfeiters. That would be weird if the governments prefer corporate interests to issues of national security, but this war on copyright infringement is really getting out of hand.