Anonymous begins dump of stolen ISP data
Anonymous Australia has followed through with its promise to dump of what appears to be AAPT's customer data, releasing a sample of the stolen data.
The data was posted in several parts; six on Pastebin (one, two, three, four, five, and six), and four dump files. The information in these dumps appears to be about AAPT's business accounts and the contacts for these agreements.
The data appears to contain information about AAPT business customers and staff, including the names, numbers, titles and email addresses of a contact for each business agreement and how much the company spends (presumably with AAPT) each month. AAPT confirmed earlier this week that its data had been breached via its provider Melbourne IT, but had not said whether Anonymous was behind the breach. ZDNet has contacted AAPT to confirm whether the dump is its data.
There appear to be passwords in the dump. In the information leaked to Pastebin, these passwords appear to be stored in plaintext, but completely random, consisting of upper- and lower-case characters and between 8 and 11 characters in length, indicating these users were assigned passwords or the passwords were disguised in some way. But in the dumped files, there are over a thousand passwords which aren't random and appear to be user defined.
Although Anonymous Australia previously stated it would strip personal information from the data, there is still some left in the dump files.
This information includes the date of birth and marital status for many business customer account contacts, which could potentially provide would-be attackers with enough information to steal someone's identity.
The group has since made its first press release regarding the attack and uploaded a video to YouTube to explain its motives. The group states that "Australia feels the need to censor and filter every day social and personal life" and that due to this, Anonymous is "disgusted from this decision, based upon power, money, and greed".
It goes on to claim that AAPT's data was leaked using "Australian Government Monitoring Technology" and the "very same techniques used on the Australian population". Anonymous' alleged point of entry into Melbourne IT's systems, which stored the AAPT data, was a vulnerability in ColdFusion. In contrast, the proposed data retention scheme would require ISPs to collect and retain data with the understanding that it would be handed over if law enforcement obtain the appropriate warrants.
The Australian Government's Stay Smart Online advisory service put out an alert ahead of the incident on Friday, stating that data that could be exposed may include "names, agreements, phone records, IP records registrations, contracts, company information, contact persons, company bank accounts". So far, bank account details appear to be missing from the dump.
The data that was released overnight represents a small sliver of the full 40GB dump, the rest of which is expected to be released in similar small segments.