The Return of ShadyRAT

Remember that endless whinging by people using the EU venue to complain about onerous US data security criteria? Remember the endless hammering on and on about SWIFT and information required of travelers invading the precious, immutable, eternally superior privacy and online identities of Europeans?

Well, ask your beloved activists and miscellaneous Wikileaks and Anonymous loving people who are into “revealing hidden truths” about this sort of “truth” telling.

A number of people working for the EU institutions have had their emails, passwords and credit card details hacked and released to the general public over the Christmas break.

A partial list was recently published online by Anonymous, a loose network of cyber activists campaigning against the so-called 'New World Order'.

Among the victims are administrators and officials at the European Commission, Eurojust (an EU body fighting organised crime), the European External Action Service, the European Parliament and Brussels-based think-tank the European Policy Centre (EPC).

That’s right! It’s that same pacifism brigade again. Their target? Their ever expanding Pantheon of imaginary hate puppets along the lines of Bu$hChimpHitlerBurton fetishisms, which now seems to include the EU and anyone else old enough to tie their shoe laces.

All together, some 850,000 confidential details were released when Anonymous hacked into the Texas-based Stratfor Global Intelligence security firm.

Stratfor is a widely used private security research company. About 75,000 of its paying subscribers also had their credit card details disclosed, including some working for the EU institutions.

The leaked database has 19,000 email addresses ending in the .mil domain of the US military according to the Guardian newspaper. The list also included 242 Nato staff members.

Peace out, peeps, because the blame goes back to where it always does: elsewhere. Apparently it’s American lobbying the administrative issues that caused this breech!

The entire operation could cast a long shadow over intense US lobbying against a leaked draft proposal for a Data Protection Regulation from the European Commission this past December.

Among the US complaints are the European Commission's views on data breach requirements, which they consider as "overly" severe and could undermine corporate data security practices.

"It is interesting to note that the US document tends to oppose specific proposals, such as the notification deadline and fines, in support of the vague issues such as not distracting businesses from improving corporate data security practices,"

Vague things like the real effect of minutae in regulation getting in the way of data security, something that you're not going to do anything about unless the never-ending threats to change reporting requiements and practices is done.