Infamous hacker group Anonymous celebrated “Military Meltdown Monday” by turning its attention toward large government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton (News - Alert). The hacktivists broke into the private company's network late Monday then published the email addresses and hashed passwords of around 90,000 military members on torrent-sharing website The Pirate Bay.

As with dozens of other attacks this year, the purpose of the breach was to showcase how poor of a job today's companies do in protecting the personal information of its users, clients and employees. Anonymous kept with the pirate theme while explaining the ease in which they broke into the network of the government contractor, which has close ties to defense and homeland security divisions of the federal government.

“In this line of work you’d expect them to sail the seven proxseas with a state-of-the-art battleship, right?” Anonymous said in a release. “Well you may be as surprised as we were when we found their vessel being a puny wooden barge.”

In addition to the login information, Anonymous claims to have pillaged other data, including 4GB of source code and other maps and keys to various “treasure chests.”

Anonymous then spent a few pages identifying the key personnel that runs Booz Allen and pointing out all their recent activities, which include “questionable involvement” in the federal government's SWIFT program. The hacker group also implied that the contractor may have been complicit in an illegal electronic surveillance initiative.

The hackers concluded their fun by issuing Booz Allen a mock invoice for their services. The bill includes four hours of “man power” totaling $40 and $200 of password and SQL dumping. Anonymous said that the media and press were free of charge.

Anonymous expects to make more headlines in the coming days. One of the group's leaders tweeted late yesterday that they are working on “two of the biggest releases for Anonymous in the last 4 years,” according to the Inquirer.

Monday's breach is just another episode in the year of the hack.  Anonymous and other hacker groups have taken on many high-profile organizations in the last few months, including Sony, Lockheed Martin (News - Alert) and the U.S. Senate.

Beecher Tuttle is a TMCnet contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell