Nation & World

WASHINGTON — The computer hacking group Anonymous took gleeful pride Friday in announcing it had sneaked onto a conference call between the FBI, Scotland Yard and other foreign law-enforcement agencies concerning how to deal with the cyber-pirate organization.

To boost its claim, the group posted a 16-minute recording of the conference call in which intelligence was shared about two British teenagers reportedly tied to Anonymous.

At FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., officials brushed off the incident, saying that while a "criminal investigation is under way" into how the conference call was compromised, the episode was not a major incident in the annals of cyberstealth. They insisted that nothing was jeopardized.

"In the big scheme of things, how do these people fit into cybercrime?" said one FBI official. "It's pretty low-level. These guys are not that sophisticated."

However, the hackers' coup exposed a vulnerability that might have had more serious consequences.

"A law-enforcement agency using unencrypted, unsecure communications is a major fumble," said Marcus Carey, who spent years securing communications for the U.S. National Security Agency before joining security-risk assessment firm Rapid7.

"What if this event was talking about some terrorist plot to blow up something and 'they' were listening in? It could've been much worse if it was related to an al-Qaida plot or something ... So this is a lesson learned."

Scotland Yard said there was no immediate evidence its operations were compromised.

In the call posted on YouTube and elsewhere, there were jokes about a teenage hacking suspect (who one officer describes as "a bit of an idiot") and banter about McDonald's, and investigators discussed whether to delay the arrest of two hacking suspects to give the FBI more time to pursue its side of the investigation.

Updates were given on inquiries stretching from Los Angeles and Baltimore to England and Ireland, with one member of Scotland Yard's central e-crime unit telling the FBI that British police had identified a 15-year-old with possible connections to a recent breach at U.S. videogame company Valve Corp.

"Yeah, that's fantastic," an FBI official said in response. "We actually do have a pending investigation looking into that compromise."

To get inside the FBI tent by eavesdropping on the conference call — which included law-enforcement agencies from Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Sweden — hit close to home.

"The FBI might be curious how we're able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now," Anonymous taunted on Twitter.

The FBI said: "(Anonymous) got access into a system, not ours, because someone overseas in foreign law enforcement forwarded a working email into a private account. That's how the compromise was made.

"They got instructions, unfortunately, for the time and date of the call and listened and recorded it."

In London, Scotland Yard said it was carrying out its own "full assessment," adding that "at this stage, no operational risks" were jeopardized.

The two British teenagers mentioned in the recording had been arrested in the United Kingdom and publicly identified by authorities as Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis. They were allowed to return home after being arrested, according to the FBI in Washington.

The leak was one of a slew of Anonymous hacks that hit websites across the United States on Friday, including in Boston, where the police site was defaced, and in Salt Lake City, where officials said personal information of confidential informants and tipsters had been compromised.

Anonymous also claimed credit for defacing the Greek Justice Ministry's website and stealing a mountain of data from the Virginia-based law firm that defended a U.S. Marine recently convicted of his role in the bloody 2005 raid in Iraq that became known as the Haditha massacre.

Anonymous, an amorphous collection of Internet enthusiasts, pranksters and activists, has increasingly focused its attention on law-enforcement agencies in general and the FBI in particular.

The conversation from the phone call was part of an international criminal investigation that began in 2010 after Anonymous championed WikiLeaks by mounting electronic attacks on MasterCard and PayPal and other sites that had stopped collecting donations for the anti-secrecy organization.

Material from The New York Times is included in this report.