The internet collective known only as Anonymous is about to drop a bombshell.
The hacktivist group says it will publish a myriad of top secret correspondence between security firm Stratfor and millions of contacts. The group says these emails will act as a “smoking gun” for several high-level crimes.
Anonymous hacked into the Strategic Forecasting Inc. servers earlier this month and published information on the company’s clients, including credit card data and log-in credentials. The group also made large donations to charity using the victims’ credit card info.
Now, less than one week after the hack, the group says that millions of emails connecting the company to high-profile customers will soon be released.
Since word of the hack leaked online, the number of emails obtained has risen from almost 3 million to now about 5.5 million.
Stratfor says it will continue to keep its website offline while they investigate the hack. The company has repeatedly apologized for the security breach.
“As part of our ongoing investigation, we have also decided to delay the launching of our website until a thorough review and adjustment by outside experts can be completed,” Stratfor says in an email.
Anonymous operatives have taken credit for the attack, a campaign waged under the group’s Antisec Movement that targets mainstream and allegedly corrupt corporations and exposes them.
Anonymous spokesman Barrett Brown wrote on the web earlier this week that, “among many other things, a widespread conspiracy by the Justice Department, Bank of America, and other parties to attack and discredit WikiLeaks and other activist groups” were the key factors in the group going after Stratfor.
As a result of the breach, he said that the data obtained “includes correspondence with untold thousands of contacts who have spoken to Stratfor’s employees off the record over more than a decade.”
“The Stratfor operation may yield the most revelatory trove of information ever seized by Anonymous,” Brown added in a tweet on Christmas Eve.
Brown now says that subscribers to Stratfor’s emails shouldn’t be worried about the attack, but rather “It is any of their past email correspondents who might have revealed information that could come back to haunt them who should be concerned for their reputations in such cases, as they might be shown to be culpable for anything that negatively affects the public.”
To the Daily Mail, Brown adds that the correspondence that it about to be released could “provide the smoking gun for a number of crimes of extraordinary importance.”
“People talking off the record to a think-tank are going to disclose a lot of information. Their identities are likely to be in the emails,” adds Brown.
The group has been very active as of late, speaking out against the National Defense Authorization Act and decrying the Stop Online Piracy Act.
Just today, Anonymous declared that its “Operation Blackout – Day of Action” would begin on January 3, 2012.
Anonymous plans to released the hacked emails some time this week.
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