Hacker group Anonymous has helped an American Security company that released an report on Tuesday linking a Chinese military group to cyber attacks against American companies and organizations.
The Huffington Post reported that a security firm, Mandiant reported that the report could not have been made without the help of Anonymous.
Mandiant's 73 page report has a lot of detail about how China is behind some cyber attacks against American computer networks. China has disputed the claims but the report goes so far as to even identify three hackers who are believed to be working for the Chinese military. Mandiant said to The Huffington Post that it was able to find these connections by relying on public data that was revealed by Anonymous.
"In February 2011, Anonymous gained access to the website rootkit.com -- an online forum where hackers and researchers share information about hacking techniques -- and published personal data of more than 40,000 registered users online. The data included email and IP addresses," reported The Huffington Post.
"We are fortunate to have access to the accounts disclosed from rootkit.com," the Mandiant report said.
The BBC reported that Anonymous has recently suffered a hack themselves on its Twitter feed by rival hacktivists.
Experts said to BBC that users need to strengthen their passwords.
"The reason Anonymous fell victim is probably human weakness," said Graham Cluley, senior consultant at security firm Sophos to the BBC. "Chances are that they followed poor password practices, like using the same password in multiple places or choosing a password that was easy to crack.
Everyone should learn better password security from incidents like this - if it can happen to an account run by Anonymous supporters, it could happen to you," he said to the BBC.
Burger King's account was recently attacked as well as Jeeps attack. One message on Burger King's account said that the company was being sold to McDonalds while Jeep tweeted about rival cars.
Bob Lord, director of Information Security, said: in a Twitter blogost "Over the past couple of days, there's been a fair amount of conversation about account security on Twitter ... Your password should be at least 10 characters that include upper and lower case characters, numbers and symbols," he said.
Three hours after the anonymous hack, the people running their feed got control back. Raj Samani, McAfee's chief technical officer for Europe, Middle East and Africa told the BBC that there is a recent crackdown on Anonymous.
"The authorities have launched a crackdown on Anonymous and quite a number of its key members have been arrested," he said.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
