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Anonymous Steals 10,000 Iranian Government Emails 116

Posted by Soulskill from the must-be-bored-of-sony dept.
Several readers have sent word that Anonymous has hacked servers belonging to Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, making off with over 10,000 emails. "The Ministry’s website is still down as of this writing, and the servers are under Anonymous control. ... The email archive includes approvals and rejections for a variety of visas and passports, among other requests and correspondence. 'It’s near the election’s anniversary. We had to do something,' said one of the Iranian members of Anonymous from #OpIran. He said they take down Iranian government servers on a regular basis for operation days, but that obviously retrieving information required a different approach to the group’s signature DDoS attack. He also indicated an as-yet unannounced attack. 'For the election’s anniversary, we have a complete DDoS attack day' planned, he said.
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Anonymous Steals 10,000 Iranian Government Emails More

Anonymous Steals 10,000 Iranian Government Emails

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  • A la Gibson (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I'm happy that Panther Modern basically exists now.

  • Not so anonymous (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Let me see, so that would be CIA, NSA and Airforce cyber-command behind an astroturfed smokescreen of scriptkiddies...

    LOLZ

    • Re:Not so anonymous (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Nikker ( 749551 ) on Friday June 03, 2011 @05:33PM (#36334136)
      I agree this is getting to be a bit much. Every time a wrist watch goes out of sync "Anonymous" gets the blame. It's just too easy for anyone with any motivation to say "ummm Anonymous did it!!". My guess is every country will be getting "hacked" under this guise because it's convenient and because well they want to stay anonymous ;) It will be even easier now to scare Joe Sixpack into going along with stupid laws because the internet is out to get them. Most of these companies get hacked not because of their status as a target but because of their amateur level of security standards. I'm surprised stuxnet didn't get blamed on Anonymous as well there would have been lots of lulz involved in that one.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I am pretty sure that if the CIA, the NSA and the cyber command hacked an Iranian website they would not tell anyone about it at all. Why would they advetrise what they could do and what they had gotten their hands on? That's kinda the opposite of what spies are famous for.

      Also I don't think you know what astroturf means.

  • And now the bad news (Score:3, Funny)

    by dkleinsc ( 563838 ) on Friday June 03, 2011 @02:03PM (#36332776) Homepage

    Unfortunately, what they had managed to acquire was just the last year's worth of lunch menus of all Iranian embassies.

    • Re:And now the bad news (Score:4, Funny)

      by mangu ( 126918 ) on Friday June 03, 2011 @02:16PM (#36332876)

      Unfortunately, what they had managed to acquire was just the last year's worth of lunch menus of all Iranian embassies.

      Even that could be a good propaganda weapon against the regime. Imagine if the menu included bacon and champagne.

    • Actually, it's Viagra and Prozak advertisements along with several desperate attempts by the "Prince of Nigeria" to wire money into a "safe account"
      -Iranians get all the good emails

  • Ironically Enough (Score:5, Informative)

    by drpimp ( 900837 ) on Friday June 03, 2011 @02:10PM (#36332820) Journal
    When I hit the /. story I got the following message below and I was curious if there were links to the email and Iran hacker #1 equal to 1000 hacker was retaliating

    Error 503 Service Unavailable Service Unavailable
    Guru Meditation: XID: 798461344
    Varnish cache server

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      When I hit the /. story I got the following message below

      Been happening to me, too, since about 11 o'clock central.

    • Re:Ironically Enough (Score:4, Funny)

      by itchythebear ( 2198688 ) on Friday June 03, 2011 @02:18PM (#36332902)
      I can also confirm this is happening to me. This is terrible, I've gotten so much work done :(

    • Same here. Was getting that on all the stories for a while.

      Anyone else seeing a blank space at the top of the main page (running FF 3.6.x on XP)

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *

      Clearly slashdot is just encouraging us to seek a guru, to learn meditation.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        For those who don't get the reference this was the original error message you got when an Amiga computer crashed. It originates from an unusual gaming device that the developers had in the office when they were writing the OS. It was a sort of Wii style balance board, and they found you could sit on it and meditate when getting frustrated by frequent crashes. The developers, being computer gurus, put the message in as an instruction to go meditate on the error.

  • encrypted archive (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    These places need to encrypt their archives remotely.

    A new open source project, Cyphertite [cyphertite.com], does just that. They have a beta test.. and so far it works great for me.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by chill ( 34294 )

      Epic fail.

      Quote the site:

      The security of our proprietary process...

      Tour data is fully sheltered by our unique encryption process.

  • The conversation goes something like this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Conspiracy_Of_Doves ( 236787 ) on Friday June 03, 2011 @02:11PM (#36332832)

    U.S.: Anonymous is completely rogue! They attack everyone utterly at random!

    Anonymous: Not everyone, just the bad guys.

    U.S.: What are you talking about? You've been attacking us, too.

    Anonymous: *cocks eyebrow*

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Simon80 ( 874052 )
      That reminds me of this brilliant comic [geekz.co.uk]. I wish the authors had kept working on it, it was consistently hilarious.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah, those bastages at the Epilepsy Foundation for America are true villians!

    • humorous and insightful but also serving to underscore the problem. When you trust a group of people to pick and choose your good and bad guys for you, and that group has no accountability... it's like distributing loaded guns in your local preschool then telling the preschoolers to all work together in picking out the bad guys before anyone pulls the trigger. Sometimes, they'll get it right.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ErikZ ( 55491 ) *

        I think you've summed up every society that has ever existed in a nutshell.

      • humorous and insightful but also serving to underscore the problem. When you trust a group of people to pick and choose your good and bad guys for you, and that group has no accountability...

        Ah, a group like say, your own government?

        FYI -- Anonymous is the anti-thesis of the "group" of which you speak. They can't choose a bad guy for you, they can't even choose a bad guy for themselves. What they can do is cooperate with each other if&when the individuals' ideas of who the bad guys are happen to be aligned.

        The fact that so many individuals attempt to hide behind the name Anonymous in order to make trouble for the traditional groups who decide your bad guys for you is very telling indeed.

        it's like distributing loaded guns in your local preschool then telling the preschoolers to all work together in picking out the bad guys before anyone pulls the trigger. Sometimes, they'll get it right.

        Yes. Invariably, if you hand them guns they'll shoot the ones that molest and abuse them. A few accidental deaths may occur, because they are too inexperienced -- but the others would quickly take note of the consequences.

        Additionally -- this is a bad analogy, because a single member of Anonymous has very little power, much less than a child with a gun. It would be more like giving them small stones and sticks. Alone the child can not truly harm the adult abusers, but in numbers they can -- Hint: the number of children that lash out are proportional to the number of children, friends, and family that have been abused.

      • When you trust a group of people to pick and choose your good and bad guys for you, and that group has no accountability...

        The problem is, history has shown that given enough time, people will stop being held accountable even if their position is supposed to be. Presidents, congress, military, press, police, various kinds of management, etc. Unless an outside force or event (including a halfway decent person getting elected to the position and starting a legacy, though that doesn't necessarily stick) forces a new spate of being held accountable, it can go seriously downhill from there.

        It is to be feared that otherwise decent

      • There's a reason being a vigilante is often illegal. While we revere our comic book super heroes acting this way, the total lack of supervision and accountability makes even the nicest vigilante dangerous to human rights and civil liberties.

        Yes, the police often ignore those too, but they actually have someone keeping records, and if they don't, those people have someone keeping records too. When you go to the polls, you don't get to vote out Anonymous. No matter how much they may attack something you actually value personally, Anonymous and other vigilante groups aren't about democracy. They're about their own form of totalitarianism.

        That's right, when you decide your way is right and other should suffer for not agreeing with you, you've just become yet another totalitarian regime like Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Anonymous has no *right* to attack people, and we shouldn't celebrate them doing it outside the law even if they get the results you like. Some day it might be you they're coming after.

        To rip off a famous poem:
        When they came for the corporate overlords, I didn't stand up because I wasn't one.
        When they came for the foreign governments I didn't say anything either, because I wasn't one.
        When they came for me ... *muffled scream*

        • Aren't you using the poem incorrectly? It's originally about people not protesting about mistreatment/killing of individuals by the all-powerful government, when this case is about the actions of individuals against powerful organizations/governments.

          The direct harm this hack will to the government of Iran can be compared to neighborhood kids breaking one of your basement windows - annoying but not exactly life wrecking ---- unless of course that broken window reveals your daughter/sex slave that you were k

          • The poem is being used perfectly. "Them" doesn't have to be anyone specific, and in fact, most of the people involved in the Nazi attacks referenced by the poem were not government agents at all. They were just citizens doing what they thought was right because of government propaganda.

            The moral of the poem is and always was stand up for others' rights, because you want someone to stand up for yours too.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          Government is little more than a formalized vigilante group.

          I have a better chance of voting Anonymous out than I do the U.S. government. Go ahead, just try to get a referendum to secede on the ballot in your state.

          If it passes, good luck carrying it out.

          That said, I don't prefer vigilante action. I prefer appropriate civil action, but in it's absence, perhaps vigilantes are better than nothing.

          • You're sadly mistaken if you believe that.

            There is no way to vote out Anonymous. None. At least there is some formal even if disfunctional way of changing your government.

            In fact, your government also requires registration of citizenship and such, and you can hunt each person down and yell at them in person if you like. Anonymous requires no such thing. You can't even figure out who to get mad at when Anonymous screws over the wrong person in your opinion.

            Do yourself a favour and read up on how various

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by sjames ( 1099 )

              WHOOSH!

              I am aware that I can't actually vote Anon out, but I have a better chance because I can suggest it and even try to do it without being chucked into some hellhole or shot. I suspect I would also have a better chance of talking people into not supporting Anon if they went wrong than I would of dissuading the federal government from any of the many things it shouldn't be doing.

              As I said, I don't PREFER vigilantism, I would prefer a functional government that is actually of, by, and for the people.

              Most

      • Who says they're picking our good and bad guys for us? Just because Iran's not on my BFF list doesn't mean Anon is speaking for me. Maybe the people involved are there voluntarily, which means they are complicit in the selection of a target. If that were not the case, there wouldn't be a story in the first place.

        But I can't say this isn't even a little bit entertaining. Maybe they'll declare a jihad on computers next?
    • I see what you did there... and I like it. :)

  • I'd like to participate in a DDOS, but... (Score:3)

    by t33jster ( 1239616 ) on Friday June 03, 2011 @02:13PM (#36332848)
    I'm not sure about the consequences. We've seen/heard of FBI raids against DDOS participants when the target is Western financial services, but does law enforcement care at all when Anons mess with Iranian or other rogue states' sites? I'd imagine that the legality is the same in either instance, so it's really the response that I'm concerned with.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Renraku ( 518261 )

      The government will likely only get involved if there are diplomatic problems that will come from it. Most likely they'll just hand wave like China and promise that they aren't groups sponsored by the government with specific targets and goals and training, and Iran will hem and haw and threaten but in the end we have them by the balls anyway.

      Kind of like China having us by the balls. They know we can't do anything to make them stop, and Iran knows they can't do anything to make us stop.

      • Unless Iran calls its big buddy for help and China tells us to leave them the fuck alone.

        Iran imports a significant fraction of China's weapons, China buys a fuckload of Iran's oil and has their back in the Security Council when it comes to Iran's nuclear program. (Wikipedia [wikipedia.org])

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zalbik ( 308903 )

      I'd imagine that the legality is the same in either instance, so it's really the response that I'm concerned with.

      Well, just imagine that the response was the same and you would have nothing to be concerned about.

      The legality is not the same.

  • And what does the postmaster say about the amount of emails stolen?
    "It's over NINE THOUSAAAAAAND!"
    "WHAT?! NINE THOUSAND?"

  • Torrent. (Score:5, Informative)

    by FooAtWFU ( 699187 ) on Friday June 03, 2011 @02:15PM (#36332866) Homepage
    Here. [thepiratebay.org]

    Besides the obvious political angles, releases like these are probably a boon to academics doing work with text mining and the like. Public releases of email data sets have been hard to come by, something about "privacy". Of course, they're probably unlikely to all be in English, so your mileage may vary...

    • we data/text mining researchers are mostly funded by government grants...we're not likely to access, let alone use, stolen data in any traceable way.

      • we data/text mining researchers are mostly funded by government grants...we're not likely to access, let alone use, stolen data in any traceable way.

        Emphasis on those last four words, there.

    • privacy? whats that? when did they invent that?

  • Photoshop anybody? (Score:4, Funny)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday June 03, 2011 @02:56PM (#36333164) Journal
    I think that a variant of the trollface, with a turban, "the Ayahtrollah", would be a suitable mascot for such activities.

  • War.... (Score:3)

    by steppin_razor_LA ( 236684 ) on Friday June 03, 2011 @03:17PM (#36333292) Journal

    Spats between hackers and international corporations is one thing. When you attack a foreign government, that starts to get awfully close to war which is a matter for governments and not their citizens.

    It is also easy to imagine military and intelligence agencies behind these sorts of attacks and hiding behind their citizenry as an excuse.

    This sort of thing is going to continue to escalate and I predict that lives will eventually be lost..

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ErikZ ( 55491 ) *

      Bold prediction!

      Unlike a future where no lives will be lost whatsoever?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      close to war which is a matter for governments and not their citizens

      I would say that war is very much a matter for citizens given that they are the ones who have to fight them.

  • In the torrent [thepiratebay.org] is 10,356 email files. If you filter out all file names that contain the words warning, failure, visa, request, failed, or reservation, you're left with 58 files, some of which appear to be spam. So, not a great treasure trove.

    The commands I used are
    ls | grep -vEi "warning|failure|visa|request|failed|reservation" | wc
    ls | wc -l

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