The Sun hacked AGAIN!, polling data leaked

 

A user identifying himself as "Batteye" has leaked data from News Corp-owned tabloid The Sun. The leak seems to be unrelated to (although possibly inspired by) LulzSec's operations against The Sun.

The Guardian has a piece about it, although details are light. I think the most important part is Batteye's manifesto published alongside the leak, which I will repost in full:

Welcome to the year 2011. This year, we have seen all sides of the term "hacking scandal".

We have seen anonymous' protests against Paypal, Visa/Mastercard, the RIAA, IRMA, HBGary, etc. These were done with the intention of exposing the world for what it really is. Monopolists continue to censor our lives; whether we may share music, whether we can make a donation to Wikileaks, whether we ought to keep our "freedom of speech" and the right to protest. Anonymous has lead us forward by showing that an idea is unstopable, and that when there is a fault in the world, we must join together and fight against it.

We have seen Lulzsec, in a wild bid to expose the lack of security in the world, and how this carelessness exposes people. How simple things (like an SQLi bug) will discredit your company by allowing customer data to be foolishly left accessible to people with a basic grasp of web security.

We have yet unknown hackers, who effectively took down Sony's PSN because of their careless treatement of customer data.

We have News Corp - a group with which many are familiar by now. These are people who provide us with current affairs of the world. They profit from peoples suffering, peoples gains, their gossip. They live off the people. And yet the destoryed the people in the now publicised phone hacking scandal. They abused the power available to them, and harmed families by giving them something they should not have had; hope. The victims of News of the World were suffering. News Corp made them grieve more. This is unacceptable.

There are indeed malicious hackers in the world.

Many people you hear about on the news - they are not malicious. Many have not caused harm. Many do not use credit card information. Most expose the bug, learn from it, and move on.

Mankind makes mistakes. Mankind is all the better for them. Mankind learns from them. Some people, however, do not learn. Until these people are pruned by natural selection, incarceration, or otherwise, then mankind will not develop. We will remain prey to the 'malicious' type of hacker that steals credit card information, or deletes voicemail messages and pushing the victims family to grieve more for their loved ones.

This is unacceptable.

We will begin today be presenting to you, various files obtained from The Sun, a company within the News Corp group. We will continue, then, by exposing the world for what it is; a less than perfect place where we cannot trust those who we ask to protect our information. We will continue, until the list has been exhausted, or until the world and man kind realizes that we must change how we

go on.

Thank you.

Batteye.

We are all the Laughing Man. Let the chuckles flow.

This seems to be somewhat similar to the PSN hacks earlier this year, which while Anonymous officially denied leaking customer's details, they did point out that the security was effectively a screen door. In a way, it's like putting blood in the water, where hackers will swarm to om nom nom on the precious customer data. Because, quite frankly, there are malicious hackers out there, and companies are doing a piss-poor job of protecting their customers' data.