A former member of the hacking group Anonymous arranged attacks against the UK after becoming a grass for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), according to the Daily Dot.
Hector "Sabu" Monsegur instructed his Anonymous colleague Jeremy Hammond to attack 30 different countries in early 2012 as part of a sting operation against hacking crews LulzSec and AntiSec.
Court documents released in the wake of Hammond’s and Monsegur’s convictions were compared to chat logs obtained by the Daily Dot to discern which countries had been targeted, with victims previously unidentified due to a court order.
Alongside the UK the likes of Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq, India and South Africa were targeted, and the Monsegur even told the hackers to hit American government sites.
Login details, financial data and private emails of foreign citizens seized by Anonymous hackers were also uploaded to an FBI server on Monsegur’s instructions.
Both Hammond’s ten year sentence and Monsegur’s year of parole have attracted controversy as details of the operation emerged in court, with many arguing Hammond’s crimes were attributable to the FBI.
Monsegur is also noted to have played a pivotal role in the attack on the intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting (Stratfor), thought to have cost $3.78m in damages.
