Bangalore: Sailing on the tide of Christmas, Anonymous struck again, attacking the Austin-based security think tank Strategic Forecasting (aka Stratfor) on Saturday, December 24.  Anonymous, as a part of the Anti-sec movement, claimed to have been responsible for the attack that had taken place over the weekend.

Although Anonymous claimed to have posted the names, login credentials, and the credit card numbers of corporate and government customers, as well as that of individual subscribers of the think tank, George Friedman, the Chief Executive from Stratfor said on Sunday via the company’s Facebook page (while the company’s website was still down) that that only the company’s publication subscribers had been made public.

The same day saw Anonymous posting the receipts of donations that it said had made to CARE and the Red Cross with the stolen card information.

Anonymous said they were able to obtain 2.7 million (they later increased this number to 3.3 million) e-mails along with credit card information from Stratfor’s servers because the security firm had not encrypted its data.

An independent analysis on Tuesday, December 27 by Identity Finder, a data loss and identity theft prevention specialist based in New York, said 50,277 credit cards’ information had been taken of which 9,651were still active. 47,680unique email addresses, 44,188 encrypted passwords (50 percent of which could easily be cracked), and 25,680 unique phone numbers had also been taken from customers with names starting with A through M. Altogether, the report says 50,000 people were affected by the data breach.

The list of Stratfor customers published by Anonymous included Bank of America, Doctors without Borders, Goldman Sachs, Interpol, Lockheed Martin, Thomson Reuters, the U.S. military, and United Nations. Anonymous is expected to release the data of the N to Z names in the days to come.