Anonymous Launches 'Operation Wall Street'

Hacktivist group Anonymous is preparing to wage a new and expansive war on America's major financial institutions. In what it calls "Operation Wall Street," Anonymous says it will carry out attacks designed to expose "the crimes of Goldman Sachs" and other, similar firms.

"It should be the duty of any Anonymous, any hacker, in solidarity with Occupy, to release the Dox on the CEOs & any and all Executives of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Wells Fargo, Chase, Meryl Lynch, and any other guilty party," Anonymous noted in a recent statement.

Bankers' Personal Information Leaked

The goal appears to be to punish the firms (and people behind those firms) responsible for the 2008 stock market crash and associated mortgage crisis. (Source: informationweek.com)

"Their dox, any and all possible personal information on these people, must be released and made public and spread across the Internet much as possible. The people who have lost their homes and had their lives destroyed deserve to know who it was that did it," a representative for the group added.

So what kind of data is Anonymous leaking to the public? According to reports, some of the information includes email correspondence and salary data.

Anonymous has released roughly 14 gigabytes of this data and has indicated that there will be more to come in the near future. (Source: bizjournals.com)

Data Acquired via "Unsecured" Server

Anonymous says it retrieved the data not by aggressively hacking a system but simply by tapping into a Tel Aviv-based server that was "misconfigured" and "unsecured." Therefore, Anonymous says, the data was "basically open for grabs." (Source: informationweek.com)

Bank of America has confirmed that employee emails were included in the Anonymous data grab and suggested that a contractor was responsible for letting the security breach take place.

"In this instance, a third-party company was compromised," the bank noted in a recent statement. "This company was working on a pilot program for monitoring publicly available information to identify information security threats."