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.

Yahoo! Messenger Censors FilesTube Links

Censoring the Internet on behalf of the entertainment industries appears to be a growing trend. Talks about Internet blocklists, domain seizures of alleged pirate sites, and Google’s proactive filter of “infringing” searches are just a few examples. Today it appears that Yahoo! has hopped on the bandwagon with its censoring of links to FilesTube, one of the largest media search engines.

Imagine that you found this great new TV-show “Pioneer One,” which the makers decided to give away for free. You’re actually so excited about it that you want to share it with a friend by pasting them a FilesTube link in Yahoo! Messenger.

Although this might sound like a good idea to some, Yahoo! appears to disagree. Those who try to paste a FilesTube link to their contacts in the Messenger app will notice that it never reaches its destination. The link goes directly into Yahoo’s dark hole and neither end of the conversation is alerted to this “feature”.

For those not familiar with the site, FilesTube is arguably the largest meta-search engine for content hosted on cyberlockers. Founded in 2007, the Polish-operated search engine serves millions of users every day, and this number is on the up.

The big question of course is why Yahoo! Messenger users are prohibited from sending their contacts links to the site. FilesTube is merely a meta-search engine and does not host any content on its servers. It even abides by the U.S. DMCA by honoring takedown requests from copyright holders.

TorrentFreak contacted Yahoo! to try and shed some light on the issue, but since we haven’t heard back yet all we can do at this point is speculate. Theoretically there could be a non-copyright related reason for the blocking, but we have failed to come up with one. On the other hand, in tests where we sent our contacts links to similar sites did not produce the same results, which is odd.

Although not very logical, such a selective censorship attempt would not be entirely new. Just a few months ago Google decided to arbitrarily block a few piracy related keywords from their “instant” and “suggest” features while leaving direct and just as popular alternatives unharmed.

Whatever the reason is for Yahoo! monitoring private conversations and then swallowing FilesTube links, censorship is an up and coming tool that will be used increasingly to protect the interests of the entertainment industries. It complements other indirect but effective anti-piracy strategies, and despite the constitutional issues that may arise, the anti-piracy lobby will not rest before their goals are completed.