Hacking Group Attacks Weapons Maker
Hacking Group Attacks Weapons Maker

    
        
            
                    
                        
			            
                Bits            
			        
                        | Hacking Group Attacks Weapons Maker
                    
                
            
            
            
            
        
        
            
                
                    
                        
                    
                
                
                    
                        See next articles
                        
                    
                    
                        See previous articles
                        
                    
                
            
            
        
        
            
        
        
        
            
        
        
        
        
            
                    
                        
                        
                        
                        
                    
                    
                            
                                
                                    
                                    Hacking Group Attacks Weapons Maker
                                    
                                        
				By Nicole Perlroth			
                                        February 14, 2012 12:50 pm
                                        February 14, 2012 12:50 pm
                                    
                                
                                
                                    
                                     While many celebrated Valentine’s Day on Tuesday, hackers celebrated a different holiday: the one-year anniversary of the uprising in Bahrain, sometimes called the February 14 Revolution. They attacked Combined
                                    Systems, a company based in Jamestown, Pa., saying that the attack was in retaliation for sales by the company of chemical weapons “to repress our revolutionary movements.”
                                    
                                    On Monday night, hackers who say they are members of the collective known as Anonymous                                        claimed responsibility on Twitter for taking down the Web site of Combined Systems. They also claimed to have stolen employee names, e-mails, addresses, passwords and client lists, and threatened the site’s
                                        administrators that if they helped Combined Systems rebuild its Web site, they would expose those companies’ client lists and e-mails as well.
                                    The hackers claimed to have been inside the company’s network for some time but said they were forced to take down the site after Google alerted the company that a hacker had broken into its Web hosts. The hackers
                                        posted some of the stolen e-mails on the online bulletin board site Pastebin, including one e-mail, dated Feb. 10, from a Combined Systems Web developer who wrote, “Looks like our Web hosts got hacked.”
                                    “It’s clear the hackers did their research,” said Jerry Irvine, a member of the National Cyber Security Task Force and chief information officer at Prescient Solutions. “They had been grabbing
                                        information for a long time. I’m sure this company spends millions of dollars a year on security, protecting their manufacturing facilities so people can’t come in and steal their product, but they
                                        let people come in and steal their e-mails and intellectual property. They need to spend as much protecting their I.T. parameters as they do their physical parameters.”
                                    Combined Systems did not respond to requests for comment. The company, which counts the Carlyle Group as an investor, describes itself as a “tactical weapons company” and has been accused by journalists
                                        and human rights groups of selling tear gas canisters and grenades to Arab governments.
                                    Last year, Amnesty International said Combined Systems had shipped a total of 46 tons of ammunition, including “chemical irritants and riot control agents such as tear gas” to Egyptian security forces.
                                    The attack on Combined Systems is part of a much broader campaign Anonymous has conducted recently against federal agencies and security groups. Last Friday, the group knocked the C.I.A. Web site offline.                                          A week earlier,  the group intercepted a conference call between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Scotland Yard                                        and released a 16-minute recording of the call. Hours after that attack, the hackers took down the Web site and stole the e-mail of the law firm that had
                                        represented Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the soldier accused of killing 24 unarmed civilians                                        in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005.
                                    As of Tuesday afternoon, the Combined Systems site was still down.
                                
                                
                            
                            
                        
                    
                    
                    
                
            
        
        
        
    
    
    
    


