Anonymous Infiltrates Federal Reserve

Hacker group Anonymous has started to move its cyber attacks up through high levels of government.

Earlier this year, the group got into the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission after the suicide of Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, who was under investigation for lifting articles from JSTOR, a scholarly journal archive.

This attack was the group's protest against Swartz's charges, which many believe worsened his depression and caused his suicide.

His father agrees. He delivered a haunting statement at his son's funeral:

"Aaron did not commit suicide but was killed by the government. Someone who made the world a better place was pushed to his death by the government."

Anonymous took this to heart. It, too, sees the government as responsible for Swartz's death, and an attack on a hacker like Swartz might as well be an attack on the group.

Rumors began swirling in the last few days that Anonymous had gone a step further, gaining access to the Federal Reserves website. For a while they were just that: rumors. But yesterday the Fed responded.

According to the statement by a Fed spokeswoman, Anonymous had indeed hacked into one of its private sites, publicizing the private information of over 4,000 bank executives.

From Reuters:

“The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product,” a Fed spokeswoman said.

“Exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system,” the spokeswoman said, adding that all individuals affected by the breach had been contacted.

It appears that the website that was hack was tied to the Fed's Emergency Communication System (ECS), which contains contact information for banks in the case of a natural disaster. Information such as mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and fax numbers were publicized.

The individuals were warned and the information was removed as soon as possible, but it has drawn attention to the security of the Federal Reserve's websites.

Specialists have agreed that it is nearly impossible for a system to be completely impervious. But it is the Fed's job to put the highest security on its most sensitive information.

The Fed remained confident that the attack had not and would not affect critical functioning.