Strategic intelligence and geopolitical analysis publisher Strategic Forecasting (aka Stratfor) have finally managed to get their website back online today after Anonymous hackers allegedly compromised their systems and lifted around 200GB of email and credit card information from site subscribers late last year. The website is now offering all their content for free apparently presumably due to the fact that it was all likely leaked publicly anyways. According to the statement by Stratfor founder and CEO George Friedman, the hackers had access to the systems since early December 2011 and Stratfor had actually been in communication and cooperating behind closed doors with the FBI since that time and had been reassured by the FBI that all the relevant credit card companies had been alerted.

According to Mr. Friedman it was apparently the FBI who specifically requested Stratfor not reveal publicly that its systems had been breached, but rather to wait and let the hackers go public with the information and use the compromised account data they had obtained. Which is precisely what the hackers did, when they apparently starting to publish information online and use the compromised credit card details to make donations to various charities around the Christmas period last year. It remains to be seen what information the FBI and credit card companies managed to gleam from the usage of this data. The investigation and backtracking whether futile or not is apparently still on going.

Stratfor’s CEO naturally also issued a formal apology to all his site’s subscribers for having stored their credit card information in their database in plain text without any form of encryption. He went on to add that Stratfor would no longer handle their own databases in relation to such sensitive data storage and instead from now on would be outsourcing that task to a company deemed equipped and competent enough to handle it in a secure manner. Clearly that’s not a lot of confidence in his own IT team but considering what happened it definitely would appear to be a sound decision.

Mr. Friedman also claims that hackers hit his systems again on Christmas Eve in what he described as an attempt to silence and censor his company, essentially destroying and managing to completely wipe clean four of their servers including deleting their backup data and defacing their website. According to their website now online they still do not know who orchestrated or carried out the attacks nor have any arrests been made, however their cooperation with the FBI investigation continues and renewed attacks are apparently expected.

George Friedman, defiantly ready for round 2?