'Hacktivists' Target Justice Department - Again - East Idaho News
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‘Hacktivists’ Target Justice Department — Again

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GETTY N 121311 HackedCode?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1337659992103iStockphoto/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) — The activist group “Anonymous” claims they’ve hacked into the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics and have leaked 1.7 gigabytes worth of data.  

Posts on the group’s website claim they have obtained Justice Department internal emails.  The Department of Justice said they were looking into that unauthorized access to the bureau’s online service, but department believes that all the information was available from the public website and that no internal operational information has been compromised.

“The department is looking into the unauthorized access of a website server operated by the Bureau of Justice Statistics that contained data from their public website. The Bureau of Justice Statistics website has remained operational throughout this time,” said a Justice Department spokeswoman.

She added, “The department’s main website, justice.gov, was not affected. The department is continuing protection and defensive measures to safeguard information and will refer any activity that is determined to be criminal in nature to law enforcement for investigation.”

Anonymous’ posted messages, however, claimed they were releasing the hacked information to expose internal Justice Department data and government corruption.
 
The FBI is launching a full field investigation of the computer intrusion.
 
Anonymous has previously targeted the DOJ website, hitting it with a denial of service attack earlier this year when the file-sharing website Megaupload.com was targeted by the Justice Department for intellectual property violations.

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