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Hacker warns of pending attack. Who is next?

Followers of Twitter account AnonymouSabu are waiting for the next shoe to drop after Booz Allen data dump.

Elinor Mills Former Staff Writer
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service and the Associated Press.
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Elinor Mills
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A tweet from the Twitter account of a purported operative within the online activist AntiSec movement.
A tweet from the Twitter account of a purported operative within the online activist AntiSec movement.

Shortly after the hackers with the AntiSec online activist campaign announced the release of about 90,000 military e-mail addresses and other data purloined from Booz Allen Hamilton, AntiSec followers on Twitter were anticipating a second data dump.

The Twitter account of someone believed to be a main operative in the AntiSec hacking campaigns, AnonymouSabu, warned on Sunday: "ATTN: Tomorrow will be two of the biggest releases for Anonymous in the last 4 years. Everyone brace. This is literally explosive."

After the Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) release, AnonymouSabu tweeted: "ATTN Intelligence Community: BAH Is just the beginning. #antisec #anonymous busy all day today. BBL"

In the United Kingdom, The Guardian speculated that a possible target was the Metropolitan police over allegations from last week that representatives of the News of the World's hacked into phone accounts of news subjects, including celebrities, politicians, and a murder victim, and listened to voice messages, as well as made payments to police. Servers of News International, which published News of the World before it shut down this weekend, had been probed last week after the allegations came out, an unnamed source told The Guardian.

Meanwhile, a court hearing on extradition for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is wanted in Sweden on charges of sexual assault, was scheduled to take place Tuesday in the UK. The Anonymous group of online activists, who are part of AntiSec, have previously taken up the cause of WikiLeaks, shutting down Web sites of PayPal, Visa and MasterCard late last year to protest the financial companies pulling support for people to make online donations to the whistleblower site.

Separately, AnonymouSabu told an Al Jazeera reporter on Twitter that hackers also had infiltrated the three major royal families in the Middle East. "When you start exposing the royal families in Qatar, Bahrain and UAE I will talk to you. P.S. We have owned [i.e. compromised] them too," the post said.

In response to criticism over the Booz Allen Hamilton release, AnonymouSabu tweeted: "I think people are confused. What we did today was more patriotic than wearing a cute little American flag pin. And we're not even American."