Classified documents said to be stolen from the Italian cyber police have been leaked through an Italian arm of the Anonymous hacking collective.
The documents were made available by AnonOps Italy, apparently in revenge for the arrests of hackers in Europe and the US. The hackers claim that the documents were taken from an Italian cybercrime unit called CNAIPIC (National Centre against Cyber Crime and for the Protection of Critical Infrastructure).
It’s unclear how Anonymous obtained the documents. The group’s Twitter account merely referenced a "source" when announcing the release.
The hackers claim to be holding a total of 8Gbs of CNAIPIC data. In a statement accompanying a preview release of that data, AnonOps Italy said that it would soon be making the biggest release in the history of the European cyber community, including evidence of exploitation and abuse by CNAIPIC.
The preview download contains a mixture of images, text documents and pdfs. The documents include a draft project plan for a geological survey, a detailed diagram showing the personal and professional relationships of a specific company, and a diagram showing the money laundering scheme allegedly used by that same company.
AnonOps Italy also claimed to have documents on the Australian Ministry of Defence, the US Department of Agriculture and private companies like Exxon Mobil and Gazprom.
"We are working to try to understand the scale of what happened," the Italian police told the Associated Press. "We have to verify if documents have been taken and which ones."
Meanwhile, the Austrian branch of Anonymous has claimed to have accessed 214,000 personal records held by the Austrian television licensing agency, GIS, many of which included banking data, it says.
In a related announcement, the director of the agency which protects the US government from cyber attacks has resigned in the wake of recent breaches of federal systems.
Randy Vickers of the Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) resigned on on Friday last week. The email announcing his resignation was leaked on Monday, and the Department of Homeland Security confirmed its authenticity, although it provide no reason for Vickers sudden departure.
The Navy, the FBI and the CIA have all been targeted by hackers recently, as have several Federal contractors, including Booz Allen Hamilton and IRC Federal.
