The leak was one of a slew of Anonymous hacks that hit websites across the United States on Friday, including in Boston, where the police site was defaced.
Associated Press
LONDON — Trading jokes and swapping leads, investigators from the FBI and Scotland Yard spent the conference call strategizing about how to bring down the hacking collective known as Anonymous, responsible for a string of embarrassing attacks across the Internet.
Unfortunately for the cyber sleuths, the hackers were in on the call, too — and now so is the rest of the world.
Anonymous published the roughly 15-minute-long recording of the call on the Internet on Friday, gloating in a Twitter message that “the FBI might be curious how we’re able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now.”
The humiliating coup exposed a vulnerability that might have had more serious consequences had someone else been listening in on the line.
“A law enforcement agency using unencrypted, unsecure communications is a major fumble,” said Marcus Carey, who spent years securing communications for the U.S. National Security Agency before joining security-risk assessment firm Rapid7.
“What if this event was talking about some terrorist plot to blow up something and ‘they’ were listening in? It could’ve been much worse if it was related to an al-Qaida plot or something … So this is a lesson learned.”
The leak was one of a slew of Anonymous hacks that hit websites across the United States on Friday, including in Boston, where the police site was defaced.