HackingAnonymous takes down U.S. weapons manufacturer
On Monday hacktivists from the group known as Anonymous announced that they had taken down the website of Combined Systems, a U.S. based weapons manufacturer; the weapons company drew the ire of Anonymous as well as human rights groups for its role in the suppression of the Arab Spring protests across the Middle East
Anonymous takes down another web site, this time Combined Systems // Source: anonnews.org
On Monday hacktivists from the group known as Anonymous announced that they had taken down the website of Combined Systems, a U.S. based weapons manufacturer.
The New York Times reports Anonymous has also stolen and posted the names, emails, addresses, and passwords of employees. In addition the group threatened the website’s administrators that they would be next if they helped Combined Systems rebuild its site.
The weapons company drew the ire of Anonymous as well as human rights groups for its role in the suppression of the Arab Spring protests across the Middle East. According to Amnesty International, Combined System, which describes itself as a “tactical weapons company,” has shipped Egyptian security forces a total of forty-six tons of ammunition including “chemical irritants and riot control agents such as tear gas.”
Anonymous claims that it had infiltrated the company’s networks and been bidding their time, slowly stealing information, but Google recently alerted the weapons manufacturer that the hackers had broken in, prompting the hackers to take the site down.
As of late Tuesday afternoon, the defense firm’s site was still inaccessible.
“It’s clear the hackers did their research,” said Jerry Irvine, the chief information officer at Prescient Solutions, in an interview with the New York Times. “They had been grabbing information for a long time. I’m sure this company spends millions of dollars a year on security, protecting their manufacturing facilities so people can’t come in and steal their product, but they let people come in and steal their e-mails and intellectual property. They need to spend as much protecting their I.T. parameters as they do their physical parameters.
The attack came on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the uprising in Bahrain.
