New hacking group hits government websites, leaks stolen data

A hacker group that named itself “The Unknowns” has recently boasted on Pastebin of having compromised a number of government, business and educational websites, including ones belonging to the European Space Agency, the French Ministry of Defense, the US Air Force, the Thai Royal Navy, the Bahrain Ministry of Defence and NASA’s Glenn Research Center.

The hacks have allegedly been executed in the past two months, and to prove that they actually did it, the group posted screenshots and information pilfered from the websites and databases, including administrative usernames and passwords.

If the accompanying statement is to be believed, the goal of the hacks was to make the owners of the websites ramp up their security.

“We’re ready to give you full info on how we penetrated threw [sic] your databases and we’re ready to do this any time so just contact us, we will be looking forward for this,” they concluded.

Stefano Zatti, the security office manager for the European Space Agency (ESA) has commented the hack by saying that the attackers got into the agency’s external servers and databases by using SQL injection. He added that the group has compromised user IDs, but not the encrypted passwords.

According to PCWorld, the group also released some 215MB of documents belonging to the US Air Force, which included a variety of unclassified documents, expense reports, and emergency communications plans.

SC Magazine reports that home address and telephone numbers of more than 700 US Government staff were published online, but the claim is hard to confirm as many of the Pastebin posts containing the data have already been taken offline.