Anonymous hacked the the St. Louis Federal Reserve emergency communications system.

ECS is the emergency communications system for seventeen states, with plans to add seven new states this year. ECS estimates it holds 40 percent of America’s state-chartered banks as its users.

The ECS was deployed in 2008 and is the means by which bank supervisory agencies such as the Bank Department and the Federal Reserve Supervision and Regulation functions to communicate with financial institutions during emergencies.

The ECS system enables agencies to establish two-way communications channels with institutions during a crisis to exchange critical information; crises such as natural or man-made disasters (weather, fire, and so on), “chemical biological events or threats,” and “events affecting the financial markets.”

Sensitive information on thousands at state-charter banks and credit unions—including login information, credentials, IP addresses, and contact information—was listed in a spreadsheet and posted to a government site, then announced and claimed by the “Operation Last Resort” faction of Anonymous.

The Fed downplayed the breach until a host of security groups got on the case. One security group has posted the headers of the hacked pages, showing Anonymous got 4,000 banking executives detailed info, including passwords.

A final thought. What do you think the cost of this breach is? The Ponemon survey data shows that the average cost per financial services record breached is $247. Using that calculation the breach cost $247 x 4607 = $1,137,929. I would argue a breach of this type will cost much, much more. That is because thousands of organizations are currently resetting executives passwords on all the systems where there may have been password reuse and are following their incident response protocols.

What is more amazing Anonymous youtubes. You'lll find yourself agreeing with and it is also the videos are fairly artistic and have over 1.3 million hits already with about five thousand comments in a space of two days.

This is their operation last resort as we talked about here.

We happen to use the St. Louis Federal Reserve FRED system for graphing so I would be very bummed if something happened to it. In terms of actual economic statistics, the St. Louis Federal Reserve is a treasure cove of public and free tools for our understanding.

Needless to say the FBI is frothing at the mouth to get these people and with most protest activity, the only thing mentioned in the major press are any crimes involved, not the message.

Thing is, if Anonymous could hack government sites so easily, what do they think China is doing? Talk about cyberwarfare, I think one could also take this as a wake up call.