Leaked Info Allegedly Shows The Absurd Lengths BofA Goes To Spy On Hackers

Anonymous hackers have released 14 gigabytes of information allegedly related to Bank of America and a web intelligence firm it hired to spy on hackers and social activists last year.

Emails detail how employees of TEKSystems actively watched hacker forums and social media sites for any remotely relevant pieces of "intelligence."

The leak includes a list of more than 10,000 words, phrases, and (seemingly arbitrary) Wikipedia entries — everything from "jihad" to "keg stand" to "I Wish That I Had Duck Feet" — used to find items on forums like anonops and sites including Facebook, Twitter (and Tweetdeck), pastebin, and various blogs.

A press release from Par:AnoIA (aka Anonymous Intelligence Agency) states that the data "clearly shows that the research was sloppy, random and valueless."

But the emails include "Daily Cyber Threat Highlights" that list events and stories from all over the world.

And the data dump adds a new element to what is known about public and private entities surveilling protestors of Occupy Wall Street.

We knew that web intelligence firm Ntrepid mapped online relationships between anarchists and the leaders of Occupy. These documents reveal that TEKSystems assembled "intelligence" reports on both Occupy and hackers for (at least) the first 11 months of 2012.

Anonymous insists it was not a hack:

"[T]he data was not acquired by a hack but because it was stored on a misconfigured server and basically open for grabs. Even more alarming, the data was retrieved from an Israeli server in Tel Aviv."

"As a bonus," the hackers released 4.8 gigabytes of data containing the salary information top executives around the world, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt.