Hackers exposes former British PM Tony Blair data

Hackers today released what looks like personal information on former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, including the contents of his electronic address book, with contact data for members of Parliament and for what could be Blair's dentist and his mechanic.

The group, Team Poison, claims to have accessed the Blair office's webmail server "via a private exploit" in December of last year. (Though the group said seperately that they've had the information "for 1 year now.") In the document, which was put up on Pastebin around 6:30 p.m. ET on Friday, the hackers claim that they "still have access to the webmail server, [sic] phone numbers may have changed but all the information is legit."

According to the Team Poison Twitter (manned by a hacker called "Trick"), the motive seems to be political — Blair is described as a "war criminal," and Trick seems to imply that those whose information is being released "supported the war in iraq." (How Team Poison knows that Blair's dentist, whose address and phone number appear in the file, was pro-war, is unclear.)

Meanwhile, hacker group LulzSec, which has claimed credit for hacks on Sony, the CIA, the U.S. Senate, and, last night, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, promised in a tweet today that it would be "releasing more goods on Monday!"

LulzSec and TeaMp0isoN have been in a public spat, claiming to have attacked each other's servers and threatening to expose rival members. On Wednesday, someone released information purportedly exposing the identity of a key member of LulzSec who goes by the nickname "Sabu."

TeaMp0isoN was described in a FoxNews.com article yesterday as a group of professional hackers linked to the Palestinian-friendly "Mujahideen Hacking Unit" that defaced Facebook in December. "We're here to show the world that (LulzSec are) nothing but a bunch of script kiddies," Hex0010, a 23-year-old member of TeaMp0isoN, told the Web site, using a derogatory phrase for inept hackers.

The attacks are just the latest in a recent wave of incidents that have left many Web sites defaced, much customer data exposed, and much corporate and government data leaked.

Earlier today, PBS.org, which was defaced in May by LulzSec, was targeted again by "Warv0x (AKA Kaihoe)," according to a Pastebin file. "This wasn't done for fame or fun, just proving LulzSec aren't as good as they think they are," the hacker said in a note on The Hacker News. "I haven't rooted the box or been up to crack the hashes, I'm just proving that most of their attacks are very lame and basic (i'm pretty sure and automated) SQL injections and further privilege escalation, which is just a matter of time."

A PBS.org spokeswoman confirmed to CNET in an e-mail that the site was hacked. "What we have seen is that one area of one Web site--the portraits area of the Web site Becoming American, was defaced," said Jan McNamara of PBS.org. "A very small number of PBS administrator usernames and encrypted passwords were exposed."

Also today, the Guardian released Internet Relay Chat logs that the newspaper said were leaked from a private LulzSec chat room. In the logs, Sabu warns others to be careful who they talk to about the group's activities. "You realize we smacked the FBI today," Sabu says in the logs. "This means everyone in here must remain extremely secure."

In those logs, there are a few brief references to "Ryan," but it's unclear what Ryan's role is or whether he's the same person as the 19-year-old Ryan Cleary who was arrested earlier this week in Essex, England, on computer charges. Cleary was charged Wednesday in connection with a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks, including one earlier this week on the Serious Organized Crime Agency in the U.K. that was organized by LulzSec and the Anonymous group as part of a campaign to target government and financial organizations.

LulzSec had said that Cleary operated one of the group's chat rooms on his IRC server but that he was not a key member of the group.

A hearing in the case was reportedly scheduled for Saturday morning.