By Kasey Joyce
St. Louis (KSDK) - Monsanto hacked. A cyber activist group has targeted the St. Louis-based company for the past two months, breaching their servers and releasing information on hundreds of Monsanto employees.
This cyber activist group is called Anonymous. It's well-known among the tech community. Recently, the group has taken responsibility for cyber attacks against several oil firms and banks. And Monsanto is the latest company on its hit list.
"Basically it's a group of organized hackers who are using their hacking skills to make political statements," said cyber security expert David Maestas, who works for Techguard in O'Fallon, MO.
For the past two months, Anonymous has been making a statement against Monsanto.
The technology website CNET is reporting Anonymous went public about the attack on a website called Pastebin.
The group wrote, "Over the last 2 months we have pushed the exposure of hundreds of pages of articles detailing Monsanto's corrupt, unethical and downright evil business practices..."
The statement goes on to claim it took information about 2,500 Monsanto employees and associates-- their names, addresses, phone numbers and exactly where they work. The statement says it plans to publish the information on Wikileaks.
Monsanto issued a statement acknowledging the leak: "Today, a number of public and private institutions are facing cyber threats and actions around the world. Such threats are not new and something that Monsanto is constantly working to protect against. Last month, Monsanto experienced a disruption to our web sites which appeared to be organized by a cyber-group. In addition, this group also recently published publicly-available information on approximately 2,500 individuals involved in the broader global agriculture industry.
"Contrary to initial media reports, only 10 percent of this publicly-available information related to Monsanto's current and former employees. The list also included contact details for media outlets as well as other agricultural companies. Information on these attacks has been turned over to the appropriate authorities. We remain vigilant in protecting our information systems."
"Anytime an employee's personal information gets out, it's a concern for that employee," Maestas said.
But in this case, where the information was already public, Maestas says the threat is not as great. Still, it points to a big problem companies like Monsanto face.
"One of the lessons learned is that companies, especially high profile companies like that need to take a close look at how they're securing their network," Maestas said.
Because as anonymous said in its statement, "expect us," because they might strike again.
KSDK