Hackers Expose Tony Blair’s National Insurance Number

The address book of former prime minister Tony Blair, including his National Insurance n umber,  has been published online by Team Poison, a hacker group that argued with Lulzsec.

The inforrmation, posted at Pastebin,  includes contact details for Number 10 Downing Street, contacts like Lord Derry Irvine and a garage. Team Poison has claimed it was accessed from a webmail account  in December 2010, and Downing Street has said it appears to have come from the email of a former Blair colleague.

Attention seeking

The hack has been dismissed as attention seeking, coming from a group which had fallen out with Lulzsec, the hacker group responsible for the most high profile attacks of recent weeks. At the weekend, Lulzsec announced it was disbanding for now.

Much of the information – apart from the National Insurance number – is publicly available; the number for Downing Street turns out to be that of the press office, which is available online.

As such, it made a poor choice for publicity by a group which had accused Lulzsec of being “script kiddies” (unskilled hackers using working with simple tools).  “I would suspect the average script kiddie could have hacked this one,” said eWEEK Europe columnist Eric Doyle.