Operation AntiSec
An offshoot of the group calling themselves LulzSecBrazil launched attacks on numerous websites belonging to the Government of Brazil and the energy company Petrobras.
LulzSec claimed to retire as a group, but on 18 July, they reconvened to hack into the websites of British newspapers The Sun and The Times, posting a fake news story of the death of the publication's owner Rupert Murdoch.
Anonymous released their first cache of the operation on 27 June 2011, taken from an anti-cyberterrorism program run by the United States Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The press release accompanying the beginning of the operation called for supporters to steal and publish classified government documents under the name AntiSec.
The release, titled "chinga la migra", roughly translating to "fuck the border patrol", including email addresses and passwords and hundreds of documents marked "sensitive" or "for official use only".
In response, they mobilized the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center and locked remote access of Department of Public Safety email accounts.
[31] Anonymous noted that their motivation stemmed from a desire to make police officers "experience just a taste of the same kind of violence and terror they dish out on an every day basis.
[35] The release also included a file containing internal mapping of Viacom servers as well as passwords and data from umusic.com, a website of Universal Music Group.
[39] On 4 July, Anonymous released a document containing 27 administrative usernames and passwords from an Apple Inc. system used to operate online technical support follow-up surveys.
[43] The 74 sites had their normal pages replaced with an Antisec logo and a message denouncing supposed attempts at internet censorship by the Turkish government.
[47] They also claimed to have obtained information allowing them to log into various virtual private networks and access panels belonging to the United States Department of Energy.
[49] On 11 July, Anonymous hacked into systems belonging to defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, breaking through barriers that the group described as having "no security measures in place."
[53] Booz Allen confirmed the intrusion on 13 July, but contradicted Anonymous' claims in saying that the attack never got past their own systems, meaning that information from the military should be secure.
The data related to oil, nuclear, and other firms deemed to be involved in "critical infrastructure", as well as government agencies including the Department of Defence of Australia.
The internal documents generally concern contracts that ManTech has with NATO, the nature of which Anonymous claims shows a waste of taxpayer money.
They also used stolen credit card numbers to make donations to the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Chelsea Manning Support Network.
[67] On 16 August, Anonymous gained access to the email account of Richard Garcia, former assistant director in charge of the FBI field office in Los Angeles and senior vice president of Vanguard Defense Industries, in the name of AntiSec.
They claimed that the firm's relationships with United States military and law enforcement organizations made it a legitimate target as part of the operation.
[69] In retaliation for arrests of people who allegedly participated in Operation AntiSec, and especially Topiary, Anonymous attacked the website of the Texas Police Chiefs Association.
The same day, the group brought down the website of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for the justice system's characterization of Anonymous activities as "cyber-terrorism".
The group claimed the action as part of their attack on law enforcement in support of the Occupy movement and in protest for prosecution of computer criminals in general.
[75] The release includes forensic experts discussing techniques for tracking cybercriminals and how different companies respond to law enforcement requests for information.
In a number of interviews published Monday, BlueToad apologized to the public for the incident, explaining that hackers had broken into the company's systems in order to steal the file.
[86] On 4 July, someone going by the name f1esc posted a file to The Pirate Bay containing 600 megabytes of information described as national "AU election data" and labelled with the tag #Antisec.
[93] A hacker going by the name Thehacker12, a self-purported AntiSec supporter but not a member of Anonymous, released data stolen from event management company allianceforbiz.com on 24 August 2011 on Mediafire and Pastebin.
The release contained a spreadsheet of usernames, email addresses, passwords, employers, and other information of around 20,000 people, many of them United States government employees or contractors.
Prosecutors identified the suspects after computer security company Fox-IT helped them gain access to a chat channel thought to be used by the group.
His lawyer Gideon Cammerman stated that, while his client did help publicize LulzSec and Anonymous attacks, he lacks the technical skills to have been anything but a sympathizer.
The two are accused of conspiring to commit offenses under the Computer Misuse Act of 1990; police said that the arrests related to investigations into LulzSec member Kayla.
The FBI revealed that supposed LulzSec leader Hector Xavier Monsegur, who went by the username Sabu, had been aiding law enforcement since pleading guilty to twelve counts, including conspiracy and computer hacking, on 15 August 2011 as part of a plea deal.
