Anonymous Leaks 90,000 Military Email Accounts in Latest #AntiSec Attack
Booz Allen Hamilton is a massive American consulting firm that does a substantial amount of work for the Pentagon. This means they've got a lot of military business on their servers—which Anonymous hacked.
Context & Ripple Effects
Anonymous's #AntiSec campaign has been escalating through the defense-contractor layer for weeks: three days earlier the group dumped what it claimed were private emails and databases from FBI contractor IRC Federal (leaked a cache of sensitive security data from an FBI contractor), and in March coverage was already asking whether Anonymous had become the new WikiLeaks after its Sony and Iran intrusions.
Booz Allen Hamilton raises the stakes on both sides of that question. It is not a niche target but one of the Pentagon's largest consulting firms, meaning the 90,000 military email accounts pulled from its servers are a direct strike at US defense infrastructure rather than at a corporate or government symbol.
First-order effects
- Booz Allen Hamilton faces an immediate breach-response burden: assessing what else beyond the 90,000 military email accounts sat on the compromised servers and notifying Pentagon clients whose correspondence passed through them.
- Anonymous converts stolen military correspondence into public material, extending a leak cadence that has run from Iranian ministry servers in early June through IRC Federal to this dump.
Second-order effects
- Every federal IT contractor now competes on security posture as much as price, because a Booz Allen-class firm holding 'a lot of military business' has just demonstrated how much sensitive material concentrates on contractor servers.
- The group's June warning to NATO, following its report condemning Anonymous, signals that government institutions criticizing the group become targets themselves — raising the expected cost of official pushback.
Third-order effects
- If contractor networks remain the softest path into classified-adjacent material, defense procurement will drift toward treating vendor security as a primary selection criterion rather than an assumed baseline.
- Anonymous operating as its own publication platform — dumping raw archives rather than negotiating with media outlets — tests whether the WikiLeaks intermediary role gets absorbed by the hackers themselves, the exact question the March coverage posed.
The trend: Hacktivism in 2011 is shifting from corporate symbolism toward direct strikes on national-security infrastructure, with contractors like Booz Allen replacing governments as the preferred entry point.