Anonymous decided to have an end-of-year cyber attack blow out, according to some sources. Venture Beat reports that the notorious hacker group is the likely suspect in a new cyber attack on the Austin, Texas-based security firm Stratfor. The organization admitted on its Facebook page that on December 24 "an unauthorized party disclosed personally identifiable information and related credit card data of some of our members."
While it is sometimes hard to tell if a cyber attack on a group is in fact the work of Anonymous, this newest incident seems to be the real deal. The group"s Twitter page posted a link to the Pastebin web site that claims to list Stratfor"s secret clients. Stratfor has denied this claim, saying that the list that was posted was simply "a list of some of the members that have purchased our publications."
Anonymous claims to have 200 GB of data from Stratfor and says it will release more information from that database in the near future. It also says it will steal $1 million from the company"s credit card accounts and give that money to a number of charitable groups such as American Red Cross, CARE and Save the Children. We are not sure if any of those groups would accept any donations if they knew it came from stolen credit cards.