Posted by: NetLib on Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Originally published at: IT Security & Network Security News
Copyright: IT Security & Network Security News

Cyber-Attacker Dumps Log-ins for 20,000 Customers, U.S. Employees

An admirer of Anonymous acted independently to breach an outsourced provider and steal a customer list with log-in credentials. Many on the list were U.S. government employees.
 
A solo attacker has hacked  into an events management company and obtained sensitive information belonging to 20,000 individuals, many of whom were United States government employees or contractors.

The cyber-attacker posted an Excel spreadsheet containing log-in credentials and personal information for 20,000 people obtained from allianceforbiz.com, according to a blog post signed by "Thehacker12" on Aug. 22. Allianceforbiz.com is a professional trade show management company that manages conferences, meetings and trade shows for customers, according to the company Website.

The list has been made public on Pastebin and Mediafire and a message posted on Twitter: "20,000 email-passwords had been leaked consisting mostly of US Mill Army, Govern. & corporate giants."

The spreadsheet contains usernames, passwords, email addresses. company name, and also whether the individual works for a government agency, Catalin Cosoi, head of Bitdefender Online Threats Lab, told eWEEK. Identity Finder, a data loss prevention software vendor, ran the file through its software and found 13,322 passwords and 17,590 email addresses in the file. Only 11,358 of the passwords had a username associated with them, Todd Feinman, CEO of Identity Finder, told eWEEK.

The file also contained 17,668 company names, of which 14,739 were unique, and most had only one email address associated with each name, according to the analysis. This means more than 14,000 organizations may be affected by Thehacker12's breach of allianceforbiz.com.

Since allianceforbiz.com managed events for customers, it is likely that the list contained the person in each organization who was working directly with the provider. However, there were some organizations with 10 or more email addresses associated with the name, Identity Finder found in its analysis.

"Interesting to note most of these are government entities," Feinman said.

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