[July 22, 2011] Anonymous hackers claim to have accessed NATO servers Tweet BRUSSELS, Jul 21, 2011 (dpa - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- The computer hacker group Anonymous on Thursday claimed to have broken into NATO servers and acquired "lots of restricted materials." It published eased two documents online appearing to stem from committees of the military alliance's council of ambassadors. "Yes, NATO was breached," Anonymous wrote on the micro-blogging site Twitter. "And we have lots of restricted material ... In the next days, wait for interesting data." "We are sitting on about one gigabyte of data from NATO now, most of which we cannot publish as it would be irresponsible," the hacking group added later. It did post a 36-page document dated August 2007 -- titled "CIS Support for New HQ ISAF Joint CIS Control Centre" -- along with a 10-page document dated January 2008 and titled "Outsourcing of Balkans CIS Support." CIS typically stands for communication and information systems. ISAF is the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan. Both documents feature NATO logos and "NATO Restricted" headers, but their validity could not immediately be verified. They were released on a Belgian national holiday, with NATO headquarters closed. A NATO official said: "NATO is aware that a hackers group has released what it claims to be NATO classified documents on the internet. NATO security experts are investigating these claims. We strongly condemn any leak of classified documents, which can potentially endanger the security of NATO Allies, armed forces and citizens." Anonymous has been linked with numerous denial-of-service internet attacks, which incapacitate websites by bombarding them with queries from networks of hijacked computers. Suspected group members have been arrested in Britain, Holland and most recently in the United States, where the FBI linked 14 people to a cyber attack on PayPal -- in apparent retaliation for closing down a donation account for the whistle-blower website WikiLeaks. Anonymous recently also promised to release a trove of emails from media mogul Rupert Murdoch, after hacking into the website of the British newspaper The Sun. The group posted a message to NATO on one of its websites, taking issue with the military alliance for having "singled out Anonymous as a threat to 'government and the people.'" "The only threat transparency poses to government is to threaten government's ability to act in a manner which the people would disagree with, without having to face democratic consequences and accountability for such behaviour," it argued. "Do not make the mistake of challenging Anonymous," the undated message also reads, before ending with "We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us..." To see more of dpa, go to http://www.dpa.de/English.82.0.html Copyright (c) 2011, dpa, Berlin Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For more information about the content services offered by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (MCT), visit www.mctinfoservices.com. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]