WikiLeaks' Stratfor dump lifts lid on intelligence-industrial complex | Pratap Chatterjee. What price bad intelligence? Some 5m internal emails from Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based company that brands itself as a "global intelligence" provider, were recently obtained by Anonymous, the hacker collective, and are being released in batches by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website, starting Monday. The most striking revelation from the latest disclosure is not simply the military-industrial complex that conspires to spy on citizens, activists and trouble-causers, but the extremely low quality of the information available to the highest bidder.
Clients of the company include Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, as well as US government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Marines. Analysts working on the Middle East for the company appeared to be very poorly informed, with no more experience than a semester of studying abroad, according to journalists who have studied the documents. George Friedman on Email Theft and the Wikileaks Release. Watch D.C. | Stratfor vs. Anonymous. Strange Bedfellows. DPS troopers at the Capitol filming Occupy Austin Photo by John Anderson On Jan. 11, George Friedman, founder and CEO of Stratfor, the Austin-based "geopolitical analysis" company, posted a report about the December "Anonymous" hack of the Stratfor website, its credit card records, and its email archives. Several of the company's servers were also destroyed, Friedman reported, in sabotage "clearly designed to silence us by destroying our records and the website.
" Friedman reports on what happened, the company's response, and its plans going forward. On Jan. 22, a few Stratfor emails were posted and circulated on the Internet, and at least one – concerning Occupy Austin – calls into question Friedman's assurance that Stratfor possesses no "classified intelligence from corporations or governments. " The discussion itself is fairly unremarkable, even superficial. The Stratfor response seems not quite as credulous. StratFor defies Xmas hackers, goes back online. Almost a month after hackers broke into its site and leaked its data, think tank Strategic Forecasting Inc.
(Stratfor) went back online early morning Thursday (Manila time). But visitors to Stratfor's website as of 4 a.m. on Thursday were still greeted with an error message that Stratfor claimed was a "service interruption" due to "increased traffic. " "Due to the high volume of interest in our new website, we are currently encountering a service interruption. We are working with outside experts to increase our capacity to handle the increased traffic to the new website," it said as of 4 a.m. Stratfor chief executive George Friedman, in a YouTube video lasting more than five minutes, admitted the hack was "our failure. " "This was a failure on our part. Last Christmas Day, hackers staged a cyber-attack on Stratfor, claiming to use the stolen data to make $500,000 in charitable donations to The American Red Cross and Save the Children, and other charities.
Stratfor apparently targeted again by hackers. NEW: The FBI will investigate latest instances of apparent hackingAn apparently fake e-mail is sent out, purportedly from StratforStratfor acknowledges the problem on its Facebook pageStratfor, a global intelligence company, was hacked in December (CNN) -- Hackers appear to have struck Stratfor again.
E-mail allegedly sent out by the global intelligence outfit early Friday told customers that the company "would like to hear from our loyal client base as to our handling of the recent intrusion by those deranged, sexually deviant criminal hacker terrorist masterminds. " The e-mail, which included sexual references, had multiple links. The Austin, Texas-based company responded with a statement from CEO George Friedman acknowledging "false and misleading communications that have circulated within recent days. " "This email, and all similar ones, are false and attempt to prey on the privacy concerns of customers and friends," Friedman said.