Baku, January 10 (AZERTAC). The loose-knit hacking movement Anonymous claims to have stolen thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to clients of US-based security think-tank Stratfor. One hacker said the goal was to pilfer funds from individuals` accounts to give away as Christmas donations, and some victims confirmed unauthorized transactions linked to their credit cards. Anonymous boasted of stealing Stratfor`s confidential client list - which includes entities including Apple, the US air force and the Miami police department - and mining it for more than 4,000 credit card numbers, passwords and home addresses.

Stratfor - based in Austin, Texas - provides political, economic and military analysis to help clients reduce risk, according to a description on its YouTube page. Proprietary information about the companies and government agencies that subscribe to Stratfor`s newsletters did not appear to be at any significant risk, however, with the main threat posed to individual employees who had subscribed. Anonymous said the client list it had already posted was a small slice of the 200 gigabytes worth of plunder it stole from Stratfor, and promised more leaks. Fred Burton, Stratfor`s vice president of intelligence, said the company had reported the intrusion to law enforcement and was working with them on the investigation. Stratfor has protections in place meant to prevent such attacks, he said. The attack is "just another in a massive string of breaches we`ve seen this year and in years past," said Josh Shaul, chief technology officer of Application Security, a New York-based provider of database security software. Still, companies that shared secret information with Stratfor in order to obtain threat assessments might worry that the information is among the 200 gigabytes of data that Anonymous claims to have stolen, he said. Anonymous also linked to images online that it suggested were receipts for charitable donations made by the group manipulating the credit card data it stole.

"We have reason to believe that the names of our corporate subscribers have been posted on other web sites," said the email, signed by Stratfor Chief Executive George Friedman and passed on to AP by subscribers. "Stratfor`s relationship with its members and, in particular, the confidentiality of their subscriber information, are very important to Stratfor and me," Friedman wrote.