14 DAY TRIAL // Hackers of the Anonymous movement have set their sights on Relead, a company that helps its customers identify anonymous web visitors and convert the information into sales leads.
Since Relead hasn’t been too keen on revealing who its customers are, the hacktivists have decided to find out for themselves. They’ve leaked the company’s entire customer database online.
“You see, if you are an enemy of anonymity, you are an enemy of Anonymous, and we love to know who our enemies are,” the hackers said in a statement published next to the leaked data.
“Who is paying Relead to help them snoop on their unsuspecting website visitors? Who is willing to provide cash to a company that is essentially taking the NSA surveillance program as a business model?” they added.
The hackers have told SecurityWeek that it hasn’t been too difficult to gain access to the company’s customer database.
Forbes has contacted some of the individuals and companies whose names appeared on the list leaked by Anonymous.
Some of them have argued that such practices are becoming commonplace, while others believe that if they don’t use such tools, their competitors might do it.
F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen is also on the list of Relead’s customers. He says he had signed up for their free evaluation to see what type of information the service could provide.
“I was worried about Relead so I signed up for their free eval to see how much it would see. It saw almost nothing,” Hypponen said on Twitter.
He’s not the only one who found that the service couldn’t pinpoint individual visitors.
The CTO of IT security firm Rewterz.com, Muhammad Omar Khan, also said that Relead didn’t generate any useful results.
Relead representatives have not made any comments regarding the incident.