Stratfor Hacked, 200GB Of Emails, Credit Cards Stolen, Client List Released, Includes MF Global

[drgoodword]

51. The Stratfor Hack Gets Murkier

From the NYT Tech Blog:

There were also questions as to whether the Stratfor attack was really the work of Anonymous. On Sunday, someone claiming to represent Anonymous posted a message on Pastebin denying responsibility for the attack: “The Stratfor hack is definitely not the work of Anonymous.”

The confusion escalated Monday night when a separate note on Pastebin claimed that the authors of the first post were Stratfor employees and that the post “claiming the Stratfor hack is not the work of Anonymous is not the work of Anonymous.”

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/questions-about-motives-behind-stratfor-hack/

This blog post also questions whether the real goal of the hack/crack was in fact the millions of emails on Stratfor's servers. No doubt these emails contain communications from confidential sources which provide information used as part of Stratfor's research and analysis. If the emails were the real target, this could even be a covert operation designed to both secure intel and expose sources, and at the same time discredit Anonymous by making them look like common cyber-thieves with the credit card info theft and use.

In any case, as I said upthread, Stratfor is an odd target for activists. Somethings here aren't quite fitting together...