Bank of America Rejects Claim of 'Par:AnoIA' Data Leak Coming from Their Systems

Information security threats are very real and have not always been cases where hackers infiltrate and make away with data to exploit some company. In recent events, Bank of America confirmed that some of data included in an immense data leak by "Par:AnoIA" (Potentially Alarming Research: Anonymous Intelligence Agency), a group affiliated with the infamous Anonymous hacker thugs, belongs to them but it didn't come from their own systems.

What is composed of a massive 14GB data leak, contains internal Bank of America emails revealing how they choose IT consultation from TEKsystems to monitor the online activity of hackers who may or may not target the bank. Rather coincidentally, the Anonymous hacker group is on the list of hackers to monitor, among other activists involved in some way with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Every large company, especially banking institutions like Bank of America, have a prominent infrastructure or policy in place to do all they can to prevent data leaks or hacking incidents that could lead to the loss of internal information. Once information that was pilfered by hackers goes public, all bets are off as far as the denying validity of the data. It so happens that during this Bank of America data leak that the source code of an app developed by Israeli company ClearForest, called OneCalais, for the purpose of harvesting through unstructured publicly accessible information in search for relevant data.

Reportedly, by means of a press release crafted by Par:AnoIA, the data in the leak comes from an unnamed source that gathered it from a "misconfigured server" located in Tel Aviv. Being that the locality is Israel it could pay homage to the ClearForest company.

What appears to first be a clear-cut tracking of the data potentially compromised, is inevitably a poor job by TEKsystems who claim to have analyzed public data spilled as a result of the data leak. What puts this very thought it in motion is the idea that other source code, what appears to be the module of software made specifically for Bank of America in addition to salary information of various corporations including Bloomberg L.P. media corporation, was all clustered within this data leak.

Possibly, Bank of America should reconsider their efforts of contracting with other companies to spy and collect information on private citizens via publicly available information. It is a time like this that potentially leaked data, belonging to whichever company, should be the priority of one to trace and limit damages as much as possible.

Clearly Bank of America's rejected claim of the data leak coming from their systems is an irreverent point when the data taken actually belongs to them with a high likelihood of it containing other information pertaining to other companies. Hackers could really care less about where it comes from, the fact remains that damages were done, and one must take the initiative to help clean it up and pursue the culprits while ramping up security efforts to prevent future incidents. History will show us that hackers groups like Anonymous are nothing to play with on any level.