Anonymous has been really busy the past few weeks with operations ranging from stopping Internet laws in Japan to exposing Internet pedophiles in #OpPedoChat. Their latest operation has them going against large corporations with a massive dump of email addresses with the correlating hashed passwords.
The operation this time is #OpSaveTheArctic, an operation carried out in support of Greenpeace’s Save The Arctic movement. Anonymous is quick to point out that they are not affiliated with Greenpeace and only support their ideals. The original movement was an online protest of sorts that sought to save the ecosystem of the Arctic from any kind of development, including drilling. Anonymous’ contribution is exposing the emails of employees from the five largest oil companies.
Here’s what Anonymous had to say about the operation:
“The energy companies that caused the Arctic to melt in the first place are looking to profit from the disappearing ice. They want to open up a new oil frontier to get at a potential 90 billion barrels of oil. That’s a lot of money to them, but it’s only three years’ worth of oil to the world.Previously classified government documents say dealing with oil spills in the freezing waters is “almost impossible” and inevitable mistakes would shatter the fragile Arctic environment.We’ve seen the extreme damage caused by the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters – we cannot let this happen in the Arctic.
To drill in the Arctic, oil companies have to drag icebergs out the way of their rigs and use giant hoses to melt floating ice with warm water. If we let them do this, a catastrophic oil spill is just a matter of time. “
So far, Anonymous themselves haven’t used the emails in any nefarious ways. This seems to be a straight up dump where others are invited to use the emails in any way they see fit. The only thing that Anonymous has done so far is use the emails as signatures on the Save The Arctic support page for a bit of ironic humor.
Anonymous has only carried out phase one of the operation so far which targets Exxon Mobil. The passwords in the dump are all hashed so only hackers need apply in this case. We won’t link to the dumps for obvious reasons.
Anonymous still has four more companies to go as part of #OpSaveTheArctic. We’ll keep you updated if and when they announce the next phase of the operation.
[h/t: The Next Web]