Monsanto Confirms Anonymous Attacks Against Its Infrastructure

Monstanto, a large US agricultural biotechnology technology, confirmed that its websites were the target of distributed denial-of-service attacks orchestrated by Anonymous.

The notorious hacktivist collective announced a new operation yesterday targeting the leading producer of genetically engineered seeds because of what it said were the company's "corrupt, unethical, and downright evil business practices."

According to the group, so far, OpMonsanto consisted of gathering articles, researcher papers and other pieces of information that criticize the company and DDoSing its web infrastructure.

"We blasted their web infrastructure to [expletive] for 2 days straight, crippling all 3 of their mail servers as well as taking down their main websites world-wide," the hacktivists wrote in an online announcement.

Tom Helscher, Monsanto's director of corporate affairs confirmed the attacks. "Last month, Monsanto experienced a disruption to our Web sites which appeared to be organized by a cyber-group," he told CNET.

However, in addition to DDoS attacks, which are a long-time Anonymous signature, OpMonsanto supporters also engaged in information dumping which appears to be a new trend within the group. They leaked a list of over 2,500 names together with email and work addresses which they claim belong to current and former Monsanto employees and associates.

The company says the list contains publicly available information that extends beyond Monsanto into the international agricultural industry. "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," Helscher said.

The group doesn't plan to stop here and pointed out that one of the company's servers is already compromised and running an IRC service. So far OpMonsanto has not demonstrated that it's capable of the same level of damage like other Anonymous campaigns. However, if some of the AntiSec hackers decide to help OpMonsanto than the company should really be worried.