Anonymous' #OpGreenRights Hack Team Knocked Nuclear Corporation Areva Offline, Leaked World Trade Organization Emails

The hacking collective Anonymous said it was responsible for a data breach at the World Trade Organization that resulted in the leak of 53,000 email addresses. Fallout from the infiltration comes amid Anonymous’ Operation Green Rights, an ongoing project against the construction of a nuclear reactor due to be built by the French corporation Areva.

Areva.com was taken down Tuesday as well as the French conglomerate’s U.S., Indian and Mongolian websites.

Anonymous, a loosely affiliated hacker movement that often inserts itself into divisive social debates, has been outspoken in its opposition to Areva’s construction of a nuclear reactor in Flamanville, France. International concern has grown since nuclear regulators raised serious safety questions about the plant, and Anonymous has channeled its own rage into hacks on Areva’s website and now the World Trade Organization’s e-learning website.

Exactly how anger with Areva led to a hack on the WTO wasn’t immediately clear, though both hacks were celebrated in the same Anonymous chat rooms and have been advertised by the same influential Anonymous Twitter accounts. The site, ecampus.wto.org, was still offline at press time Tuesday, one day after the hack first began.

“We are here to hack and destroy all your systems,” said a post accompanying the hacked email addresses on Just Paste It, a Polish website favored by computer programmers. “We will not stop. We will not give up. We have enough rope to hang you and your puppets. Expect us.”

The info dump claims to include 53,000 emails belonging to visitors of the e-learning site, as well as 2,100-or-so email addresses belonging to WTO employees in the United States, China, Russia and elsewhere, HackRead.com said.

Both the WTO hack and the Areva hack, which temporarily shut down the uranium giant’s website in April, came after Operation Green Rights (popularly known as #OpGreenRights on Twitter) launched multiple attacks from 2012 to 2014 on the controversial agriculture company Monsanto.