Federal Reserve admits it WAS hacked by Anonymous as group 'takes revenge' for suicide of Reddit
founder Aaron SwartzFederal Reserve confirmed a temporary security breach of its computers

Swartz, 26, killed himself on January 11, just a month before he was set to go on trial in Boston for
thirteen felony charges
Family say he killed himself after he was hounded by federal prosecutors

By Jill Reilly
PUBLISHED: 05:51 EST, 6 February 2013 | UPDATED: 09:33 EST, 6 February 2013
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..The Federal Reserve has admitted it was hacked by Anonymous as the group 'takes revenge'
for suicide of Reddit founder Aaron Swartz.
The admission, which raises questions about cyber security at the Fed, follows a claim that hackers
linked to the activist group Anonymous had struck the Fed on Sunday, accessing personal information
of more than 4,000 U.S. bank executives, which it published on the Web.
Swartz, 26, killed himself on January 11, just a month before he was set to go on trial in Boston
for thirteen felony charges.

Admission: The Federal Reserve has admitted it was hacked by Anonymous as the group 'takes
revenge' for suicide of Reddit founder Aaron Swartz
Family and friends of Swartz, who helped create Reddit and RSS, say he killed himself after he was
hounded by federal prosecutors.

Officials say he helped post millions of court documents for free online and that he illegally
downloaded millions of academic articles from an online clearinghouse.
Today a Fed spokeswoman said 'The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was
obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product.'
'Exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not
affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system,' the spokeswoman said, adding that
all individuals effected by the breach had been contacted.

Last meal: Aaron Swartz and girlfriend Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman shared a dinner of his
favourite foods on the night before he hanged himself
Technology news site
ZDNet separately reported that Anonymous appeared to have published
information allegedly containing the login information, credentials, internet protocol addresses
and contact information of more than 4,000 U.S. bankers on Sunday night.

The claim was made via Twitter over an account registered to OpLastResort, which is linked to
Anonymous, a loosely organized group of hacker activists who have claimed responsibility for
scores of attacks on government and corporate sites over the past several years.

OpLastResort is a campaign that some hackers linked to Anonymous have started to protest
government prosecution of computer prodigy Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide on Jan. 11.

The Fed declined to identify which website had been hacked. But information that it provided
to bankers indicated that the site, which was not public, was a contact database for banks to
use during a natural disaster.



Hacked: This screenshot shows the hijacking of the sentencing commission website by
Anonymous. The group claim they have already infiltrated several other government sites
A copy of the message sent by the Fed to members of its Emergency Communication
System (ECS), which was obtained by Reuters, warned that mailing address, business
phone, mobile phone, business email, and fax numbers had been published.

'Some registrants also included optional information consisting of home phone and
personal email. Despite claims to the contrary, passwords were not compromised,' the
Fed said.

The central bank separately confirmed the authenticity of the message to ECS members.

The website's purpose is to allow bank executives to update the Fed if their operations
have been flooded or otherwise damaged in a storm or other disaster.

That helps the Fed to assess the overall impact of the event on the banking system.
Last month the hacker-activist group hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing
Commission to avenge the death.



On film: Aaron Swartz was caught soon afterwards this video taken at MIT was
recorded on January 6 2011 with a laptop and a hard drive that contained secured
and lucrative academic journals that had been hacked
The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch,
was taken over early on a Saturday morning.

Hackers replaced the homescreen with a message warning that when Swartz
killed himself  'a line was crossed.' At his memorial last month, held at New
York's Cooper Union, his girlfriend Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman

Stinebrickner-Kauffman's eulogy did not shy away from criticizing the role the
government played in Swartz's suicide.

'He faced a deeply dysfunctional criminal justice system, one that he is far
from the only victim of.'

In reference to the prosecutor overseeing the case on behalf of the U.S.
Attorney's office, she said he was 'hell-bent on destroying [Swartz's] life.'


Government at fault: Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron Swartz's girlfriend,
had critical words for the U.S. Attorney's office in Boston
She reflected on him taking his own life, saying 'I'm so sad we'll never see all
the ways he'll change the world from here on out.
The Boston-based U.S. Attorney overseeing the case, Carmen Ortiz, when
asked previously about the charges filed against Swartz noted that  'stealing
is stealing.'

A maximum sentence would have carried decades in prison and huge fines.
Prosecutors contended that Swartz had broken into the computer database
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in 2010 in order to access
the scholarly website JSTOR, which is pay-access. He was indicted in July the
following year.





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