Anonymous has delivered on earlier threats to hack BART after the San Francisco Bay Area transit entity "pulled a Mubarak." Wireless data service was killed in some stations last week, after BART supervisors got word that protesters were planning demonstrations within the train system. Those demonstrations were to protest the recent killing of a homeless man by a BART officer, and the 2009 fatal shooting by another BART officer of an unarmed passenger.
Today's Anonymous hack included the release of names, passwords, and other personal data stored for users of the marketing site MyBart.org. And this is the database leak. I post the link because some Boing Boing readers are no doubt regular users of the system, and may wish to know if their information was compromised. BART infosec critics are asking why such data was stored in plain text on public-facing servers in the first place.
Californiaavoid.org, a DUI site, was also defaced (screengrab above).
Anonymous has announced plans for a new protest Monday at 5pm at the San Francisco Civic Center station, as well as continued online attacks. This Twitter account seems to be one of the more reliable sources for plans. Meanwhile, BART has called in the feds.
Coverage I've been reading around the web: CNET, SF Gate, SF Examiner, CNN, Oaklandlocal.com, TheNextWeb, BayCitizen.org. The San Francisco ABC News affiliate has an interview with someone identified as an Anonymous member.
In comment threads for previous Boing Boing posts about BART's troubles (and by "troubles," I mean BART officers shooting and killing two passengers), some readers asked whether the entity was private or governmental. It's a dot-gov, a special governmental agency created by the State of California.
