Media News - Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Anonymous helped Wikileaks target Syrian government

Members of Anonymous are claiming to have helped Wikileaks harvest and leak some 2.5 million emails belonging to the Syrian Government. Four days after the release of Wikileak's Syrian Files, users claiming allegiance with the hacktivist movement said that they gave the files to Wikileaks after compromising Syrian government servers. "While the United Nations sat back and theorized on the situation in Syria, Anonymous took action," members wrote in a statement released to the media. "Assisting bloggers, protesters and activists in avoiding surveillance, disseminating media, interfering with regime communications and networks, monitoring the Syrian internet for disruptions or attempts at surveillance - and waging a relentless information and psychological campaign against Assad and his murderous and genocidal government." Members of Anonymous Syria, AntiSec, and the Peoples' Liberation Front allegedly began attempting to hijack data from Syrian servers in early February. The team worked day and night until eventually they gained access to a massive data dump that reportedly took weeks to download. By mid-March, Anonymous Syria is said to have combed through the data and discovered the personal emails of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and his wife Asma. The group released those select emails to the media. Having still had millions of emails and no way of properly disrupting them, Anonymous contacted Wikileaks. The two organizations had previously worked together on the Stratfor emails leak earlier this year. Using Wikileaks resources Anonymous was able to leak the over 2.5 million Syrian files starting earlier this June. (V3.co.uk)

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