Officials from agricultural biotech giant Monsanto have confirmed that the company suffered a network intrusion event believed to have been carried out by the rogue hacker collective Anonymous.
The had group claimed responsibility for the network hack in messages released Tuesday, as well as posting the contact information for about 2,500 people who maintain business relationships with Monsanto.
The company issued the following statements regarding the attack in an effort to downplay the severity of the breach:
"Last month, Monsanto experienced a disruption to our Web sites which appeared to be organized by a cyber-group. In addition, this group also recently published publicly available information on approximately 2,500 individuals involved in the broader global agriculture industry," said Tom Helscher, Monsanto's director of corporate affairs.
"Contrary to initial media reports, only 10 percent of this publicly available information related to Monsanto's current and former employees. The list also included contact details for media outlets as well as other agricultural companies."
Anonymous members had previously released the following Pastebin posting earlier this week:Over the last 2 months we have pushed the exposure of hundreds of pages of articles detailing Monsanto's corrupt, unethical, and downright evil business practices. We've created a nice go-to reference guide on piratepad/anonpad(anonpad.org/opmonsanto, backed up elsewhere), where anyone can read up on and add their own info about MonsantoCo.
We blasted their web infrastructure to frak for 2 days straight, crippling all 3 of their mail servers as well as taking down their main websites world-wide. We dropped dox on 2500+ employees and associates, including full names, addresses, phone numbers, and exactly where they work. We are also in the process of setting up a wiki, to try and get all collected information in a more centralized and stable environment. Not bad for 2 months, I'd say.
What's next? Not sure... it might have something to do with that open 6666 IRC port on their nexus server though ;)
Expect Us
Monsanto was likely targeted because of the company's controversial production of pesticides and genetically modified food products, issues that have have drawn the ire of progressive organizations worldwide.
Hacktivists with the Anonymous/AntiSec movement had earlier this week breached Booz Allen Hamilton's networks and published 90,000 military email account login credentials.
Booz Allen Hamilton is one of the largest consulting firms in the world, and the company does extensive business with the Federal government, including the Pentagon.
The leak was being touted as "Military Meltdown Monday" and included "logins of military personnel—including personnel from US CENTCOM, the Marine Corps, various Air Force facilities, Homeland Security, State Department staff, and what looks like private sector contractors..."
High profile members of the hacktivist movement had promised a history-making data dump on Tuesday, though indications are the collective has not yet made good on those threats.
