An Anonymous-affiliated group has leaked what it claims is a cache of e-mails and internal reports detailing intelligence on the hacktivist collective put together by a Bank of America sub-contractor.
The Anonymous Intelligence Agency (Par:AnoIA) has posted around 320mb of data it says comes from IT contractor TEKsystems.
The files purport to show evidence that the vendor was contracted by BofA to spy on Anonymous and other activist movements, combing social media platforms and public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels for useful information.
Par:AnoIA says that the research was "sloppy, random and valueless", citing a 10,000-word strong keyword list used by TEKsystems which contained triggers such as 'Jihad' and 'homosexual'.
In a statement, Par:AnoIA says that the data was not acquired by a hack but "because it was stored on a misconfigured server and basically open for grabs".
In addition to the e-mails and memos, the group has managed to get hold of text analysis software from Thomson Reuters' unit ClearForest which was used by TEKsystems to help make sense of the data it was trawling.
As an "unexpected bonus", 4.8 gigabytes of data containing career and salary information of hundreds of thousands of executives - including Google's Eric Schmidt - was also found on the server.