Photograph by AgnosticPreachersKid
A British man has been charged with hacking into the US Federal Reserve Bank and stealing sensitive personal data from many of its employees.
Lauri Love has been indicted on charges of computer hacking and aggravated identity theft after reportedly hacking into vulnerable servers in late 2012 and early 2013 through SQL injection. Once he had access to the servers, Love is alleged to have some of the Federal reserve’s websites and sent fake emails purporting to be from employees of the bank, using usernames and passwords he accessed, and posted employee email addresses and phone numbers online.
While the information Love is alleged to have accessed is not critical financial data, his actions demonstrated severe vulnerabilities in the IT infrastructure protecting on the American money supply and gold stores.
The Federal reserve admitted that their systems had been hacked in February 2013, and internet hacking group Anonymous originally took credit for the attack as part of its “Operation Last Resort” campaign to avenge the death of Internet activist and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz.
However, the indictment against Love does not mention Anonymous despite some of the evidence against Love coming from a restricted chat room used by Anonymous where Love is alleged to have boasted of his hack.
The recently unsealed indictment against Love is embedded below:
