Hacktivist group Anonymous is claiming responsibility for an attack on the computer systems of the Syrian government and its evil overlord Bashar Assad thanks to which over two million emails ended up in the hands of whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks.

As of last Thursday, the site began drip-feeding sections of the ‘Syria Files’ to its selected media partners, and given there are a total of 2.4m emails from 680 separate domains going all the way back to August 2006, it could take some time.

Anonymous revealed in a press release that its Op Syria team – comprising members of Anonymous Syria, AntiSec and sometime collaborator the Peoples Liberation Front – first breached multiple domains and servers in the war-torn country back in February.

“So large was the data available to be taken, and so great was the danger of detection (especially for the members of Anonymous Syria, many of whom are ‘in country’) that the downloading of this data took several additional weeks,” the release said.

Not knowing quite what to do with the huge treasure trove of information it had snarfed, the group handed it over to WikiLeaks, the organisation it had partnered with before in the hack of private intelligence firm Stratfor.

There were no details of exactly how the attack took place but given the usual MO of Anonymous, you can expect it took advantage of some pretty obvious web application vulnerabilities.

The hacktivist group was also keen to portray itself as a force for good offline as well as on, claiming six of its members carried medical supplies across the border and that it has been helping local activists and protesters avoid surveillance efforts by the Assad regime.

Anti-government activists in Syria have been targeted by phishing campaigns and spyware for months, most recently the BlackShades Trojan which spreads via compromised Skype accounts.

Earlier today, Anonymous released a confidential conference call between the FBI and law enforcement officers in the UK. The 16-minute call discusses ongoing investigations into hackers associated with Anonymous, AntiSec, and LulzSec.

From all appearances, Anonymous retrieved the sensitive access code information and a list of attendees from an FBI email account. The group released a roughly 15-minute-long recording of what appears to be a Jan. 17 conference call devoted to tracking and prosecuting members of the loose-knit hacking group.

The email, titled “Anon-Lulz International Coordination Call”, was published on pastebin earlier today. The email with details for accessing the call was sent to law enforcement officials in Britain, France, the Netherlands and others but the only people who identify themselves on the call are from the FBI and Scotland Yard.In a message on Twitter, Anonymous posted links to the audio recording and said the FBI “might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”

The initial link to the conference call was for an mp3 download, but it was also made available to stream on YouTube.

The FBI and Scotland Yard have now confirmed that their internal conference call describing their investigation into Anonymous hackers was illegally intercepted, as was the email containing the conference call details. The Metropolitan Police also confirmed it, saying:“We are aware of the video which relates to an FBI conference call involving a PCeU representative. The matter is being investigated by the FBI. We continue to carry out a full assessment. We are not prepared to discuss further.”

Karen Todner, a lawyer for Cleary, said that the recording could be “incredibly sensitive” and warned that such data breaches had the potential to derail the police’s work.“If they haven’t secured their email it could potentially prejudice the investigation,” she told. Following a spate of arrests across the world, the group and its various offshoots have focused their attention on law enforcement agencies in general and the FBI in particular.

Hacktivist group Anonymous have compiled and published a dossier containing personal information about employees of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and US Democratic party leaders and their families.

The hacking group released a document listing the websites they planned to attack along with the names of US Democratic Party leaders and MPAA employees and their families.

The details included property values, work and home phone numbers and addresses as well as the names, ages and schools of the member’s children.

The group – who go by @YourAnonNews on Twitter – took credit for shutting down the Bureau’s official website FBI.gov earlier today, which as of 4.25pm AEST continues to display an error message.

They said the attack is in retaliation for the FBI shutting down popular file-sharing website Megaupload.com and charging the founders for online piracy.

Megaupload Limited and sister company Vestor Limited generated “more than $175 million in criminal proceeds” and caused “more than half a billion dollars in harm to copyright owners” through the piracy of “numerous types of copyrighted works,” the US Justice Department and FBI said in a joint statement.

The founder of the file-sharing websites 37-year-old Kim Schmitz, also known as Kim Dotcom and three others faced a New Zealand court today and said the group had “nothing to hide”.

But Anonymous hit back shutting down the websites of the US Department of Justice and Universal Music Group.

“The government takes down #Megaupload? 15 minutes later #Anonymous takes down government & record label sites,” they wrote on Twitter.

“We Anonymous are launching our largest attack ever on government and music industry sites. Lulz. The FBI didn’t think they would get away with this did they? They should have expected us,” they wrote on website Pastebin.

New Zealand’s police website police.govt.nz has also allegedly been targeted by the group after as Dotcom, Batato and two others were arrested in Auckland by New Zealand authorities carrying out warrants on behalf of the US for pirate material.

“The more Facebook seems to dominate the world, the closer it seems to be to its end”.

Anonymous, the shady-yet-principled hacktivist group that has previously hacked into Iran’s government emails, the Pentagon, possibly the IMF, News Corp, Anders Breivik’s Twitter account, and much more, has a new target in its crosshairs: Facebook. The hackers have set the date for Facebook’s demise as November 5, 2011.

DATE: November 5, 2011.
TARGET: https://facebook.com
Press:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OP_Facebook

http://piratepad.net/YCPcpwrl09

Irc.Anonops.Li #OpFaceBook

Message:
Attention citizens of the world,

We wish to get your attention, hoping you heed the warnings as follows:
Your medium of communication you all so dearly adore will be destroyed. If you are a willing hacktivist or a guy who just wants to protect the freedom of information then join the cause and kill facebook for the sake of your own privacy.

Facebook has been selling information to government agencies and giving clandestine access to information security firms so that they can spy on people from all around the world. Some of these so-called whitehat infosec firms are working for authoritarian governments, such as those of Egypt and Syria.

Everything you do on Facebook stays on Facebook regardless of your “privacy” settings, and deleting your account is impossible, even if you “delete” your account, all your personal info stays on Facebook and can be recovered at any time. Changing the privacy settings to make your Facebook account more “private” is also a delusion. Facebook knows more about you than your family. http://www.physorg.com/news170614271.html
http://itgrunts.com/2010/10/07/facebook-steals-numbers-and-data-from-your-iph….

You cannot hide from the reality in which you, the people of the internet, live in. Facebook is the opposite of the Antisec cause. You are not safe from them nor from any government. One day you will look back on this and realise what we have done here is right, you will thank the rulers of the internet, we are not harming you but saving you.

The riots are underway. It is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It is a battle for choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being raped, tickled, molested, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely false. It gives users the illusion of and hides the details away from them “for their own good” while they then make millions off of you. When a service is “free,” it really means they’re making money off of you and your information.

Think for a while and prepare for a day that will go down in history. November 5 2011, #opfacebook . Engaged.

This is our world now. We exist without nationality, without religious bias. We have the right to not be surveilled, not be stalked, and not be used for profit. We have the right to not live as slaves.

We are anonymous
We are legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget
Expect us

Will Anonymous be able to successfully lay waste to Mark Zuckerberg’s fortress? This is set to be the Internet showdown of the year.

The Anonymous hacking group has added the website of the Syrian Ministry of Defense to its ever-lengthening list of victims, defacing it with a message in support of the anti-Government insurrection.

Overnight, visitors to the website were greeted with the logo of the Anonymous collective plus links to videos showing protests, with a message in Arab and English.

“To the Syrian people: The world stands with you against the brutal regime of Bashar Al-Assad. Know that time and history are on your side – tyrants use violence because they have nothing else, and the more violent they are, the more fragile they become. We salute your determination to be non-violent in the face of the regime’s brutality, and admire your willingness to pursue justice, not mere revenge. All tyrants will fall, and thanks to your bravery Bashar Al-Assad is next.”

“To the Syrian military: You are responsible for protecting the Syrian people, and anyone who orders you to kill women, children, and the elderly deserves to be tried for treason. No outside enemy could do as much damage to Syria as Bashar Al-Assad has done. Defend your country – rise up against the regime! – Anonymous”

By lunchtime on Monday (BST) the site had become unavailable, which suggests either that the site has become overloaded or has been taken offline by the Syrian authorities.

Supporters of the insurrection will claim the successful hack as a propaganda coup although the Syrian regime and its leadership have long since stopped worrying how the outside world views it crackdown on anti-Government protests. The Anonymous hack tells us more about the insecurity of websites that offers convincing evidence of Syrian embarrassment.

Anonymous – and assumed spin-off LulzSec – have successfully attacked so many websites it is becoming easier to list those it hasn’t tried to undermine. It’s an eclectic and sometimes eccentric list.