Anonymous, a group of online hackers that frequently take up politically charged causes such as bringing down the websites for Visa and other credit card companies, has‚ released a massive batch of internal Bank of America emails.
It looks like the hacker group, which frequents online message board 4chan, made good on a promise Wikileaks founder Julian Assange made several months ago. Anonymous sided with Assange when several sites and services like PayPal cut ties with Wikileaks&'‚ enigmatic‚ founder amid concerns about the legality of the site. Assange and Wikileaks indicated that they planned to publish the documents in December.
But that was then a4‚¬a4¯ before Assange was arrested on suspicion of sexual offenses in December. Wikileaks began making headlines after it released 251,000 secret U.S. state department documents. The site created a stir among world governments, who have denounced the sitea4‚¬a4„s actions, and it was‚ booted by its domain name service provider EveryDNS. Assange and the sie also had their‚ accounts suspended from‚ Amazona4‚¬a4„s S3 and EC2 online cloud hosting services and‚ PayPal.
Anonymous&' host site for the internal emails has received enough traffic to bring it to its knees. VentureBeat reporters were unable to access the site shortly after the documents were posted. Errors indicated that the site had crashed due to a traffic overload a4‚¬a4¯ which kind of ironic after Anonymous coordinated massive direct denial of service (DDoS) attacks on other sites that are designed to send inordinate amounts of traffic and overload servers.
The documents indicate that Bank of America improperly foreclosed on several homes during the height of the financial crisis in 2008 that began one of the worst recessions since the great depression. The report came from a former employee with Balboa Insurance a4‚¬a4¯ a risk management and insurance firm. The employee reportedly corresponded with Bank of America employees and was told to falsify loan numbers on documents to force Bank of America to foreclose on homeowners.
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Companies: 4chan, Bank of America, WikiLeaks
Companies: 4chan, Bank of America, WikiLeaks
Matthew Lynley is VentureBeat's enterprise writer. He graduated from the University of North Carolina, where he studied math and physics, in May 2010. He has reported for Reuters. He currently lives in San Francisco, California. You can reach him at mattl@venturebeat.com (all story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com), and on Twitter at @logicalmoron.
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