Two days after Anonymous bragged about its latest government website breach and data dump, the United States Federal Reserve admitted that it had been hacked and robbed. "The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product," a Fed spokesperson told Reuters on Tuesday night. "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 Fed stopped short of pointing any fingers at possible hackers, but all roads lead to Anonymous on this one. Not only did they tweet about successfully stealing information on 4,000 bank executives, they published a spreadsheet full of the data on the web, everything from the bankers' login credentials to the cell phone numbers of their personal contacts. The hack happened around the time of the Super Bowl as part of Anonymous's OpLastResort, a new effort to go after government websites following the death of Aaron Swartz who faced federal prosecution for downloading academic articles from JSTOR without permission. The page that they created on government servers hosting the spreadsheet has since beentaken down, but the Fed has felt the proverbial glove-slap from Anonymous, always one to duel with the powers that be.
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