THE HACKING group Anonymous claims to have accessed thousands of email, personal addresses and credit card details from the US security think tank Stratfor.

The Texas-based company provides a range of political, economic and military analysis and its clients include the US defence department and law enforcement agencies.

Reuters reports that Stratfor confirmed the security breach in an email yesterday, saying that some corporate subscriber information had been made public and that its servers have been suspended.

The loosely-connected Anonymous movement claims that some of Stratfor’s files were not encrypted, allowing them access to the credit card details. It says it has posted some of the 200-gigabytes of information it took from Stratfor.

Some of the hacktivists have said that they used the credit card information to make donations to a number of organisations including the Red Cross.

BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza questioned the company leaving “unencrypted lists of credit card numbers and client details on public-exposed servers”.

The security company’s vice president of intelligence said that Stratfor has reported the intrusion to police and is cooperating with their investigation. He also said that the company has protection in place that’s supposed to block such attacks.

The Stratfor site has been carrying a ‘down for maintenance’ sign since the weekend’s security breach as per this screenshot taken this morning:

- Additional reporting by the AP