6 gigabytes worth of emails, documents and databases were leaked

Mar 5, 2012 09:30 GMT  ·  By

The official website of the Romanian National Institute of Social Economic Research and Polls (IRECSON), and 10 other domains managed by affiliated institutions, or ones under the leadership of the country’s National Agency for Scientific Research (ANCS) were breached and defaced by members of Anonymous.

The hackers were probing the websites of science and research organizations and they found a few things they considered to be suspicious.

“Our vessel did a visit to IRECSON.RO, a Romanian institution like any other, but we decided to take a closer look at it,” the hackers wrote.

As a result of their investigations the sites of the General Foundation for Education and Socio-Economic Development (fedes.ro), the Research Institute for Analytical Instrumentation (icia.ro), Cecaudit International (cecaudit.ro), RO INNO (roinno.ro and registru.roinno.ro), RIHM (rihm.ro), and IPCPMMA Project were defaced for a period of 10 hours.

As a result of the breach Anonymous hackers obtained 6 gigabytes of data, 4.7 gigabytes of which are email logs, 100 megabytes of MySQL databases and 1.2 gigabytes of documents. All the information has been deleted from the institutions' servers and made publicly available on the hacktivists’ official site.

Last weekend the hacktivists targeted the official site of DIICOT, Romania’s anti-terrorism directorate, after the agency revealed its intentions of apprehending the ones responsible for taking down important government and police websites.

Prior to the DIICOT defacement, Anonymous breached the sites of the International Monetary Fund and the National Association of Retired Military Personnel.

We have contacted the hackers on their official IRC channel and they say that they will not stop too soon. One of them told us that the list of future targets is long, but for now it's uncertain which sites they’ll hit next.

At the time of writing, the affected sites, all of them being hosted on the same server, are offline.