July 8, 2011, 6:30 PM
AntiSec Hackers Hit F.B.I. Contractor
By RIVA RICHMOND
Hackers who have claimed responsibility for a spate of recent break-ins said on Friday that they had infiltrated the networkof IRC Federal, an engineering contractor that works for federal agencies including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and stole internal documents from its database and e-mail system.
The group, which is a part of the hacktivist collective Anonymous and includes members of the defunct group Lulz Security, also said it had defaced IRC Federal’s Web site. The firm has taken the site down.
A spokesman for IRC Federal said it was investigating the claim. “We reported it to the authorities, and otherwise we have no comment.”
In a statement online that was decorated with a digital drawing of a mushroom cloud, the group complained that IRC Federal had been “selling out their ‘skills’ to the US empire. So we laid nuclear waste to their systems, owning their pathetic windows box, dropping their databases and private emails, and defaced their professional looking website.”
The group, which has been waging a campaign called AntiSec against what it calls corrupt corporations and governments, said it found within IRC Federal’s e-mails documents that included a proposal to develop for the F.B.I. a “Special Identities Modernization (SIM) Project” that it said would protect records associated with “trusted individuals,” while revealing the identities of individuals who might pose a terrorist or criminal risk to the United States.
It claimed it also found fingerprinting contracts for the Justice Department and biometrics development for the military. It also cited “strategy contracts” for the “National Nuclear Security Administration Nuclear Weapons Complex.”
The F.B.I. declined to comment.
The incident follows arrests earlier this week of 15 alleged members of Anonymous in Italy and Switzerland, aged 15 to 28, in raids in which 32 homes were searched by police. Last month, three men in Spain and 32 people in Turkey were arrested in connection with online attacks by Anonymous.
The collective has promised to retaliate, and has claimed break-ins at Italian universities and to have brought down hundreds of Turkish Web sites.