Anonymous hacks SF’s myBART website. Thousands of names, addresses & numbers released.

Anonymous has apparently made good on a promise to wreak havoc on the Web site of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System today, although not exactly as planned.

Earlier, the amorphous collective had threatened to take Bart.gov offline for six hours today, or twice the amount of time BART managers took cell phone service offline at some BART stations Thursday night in order to head off a planned protest then. The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was supposed to begin at noon pacific time, according to a release from Anonymous.

As of 30 minutes past noon, the BART site was still online but running a little slow and with one notable change to the mybart.org Web site, which currently displays the Anonymous logo as seen below.

MyBart.org was still defaced as of 12:35 PM Pacific time on Sunday.

As screen captures of the defacement began rocketing around Twitter, news came that Anonymous hackers had also accessed and posted online a database of mybart.org with user e-mails and some addresses and phone numbers.

Shortly after the mybart.org defacement, a more elaborate mark was left on californiaavoid.org, a Web site maintained by the California Office of Traffic Safety. The #opBART Facebook page claims the defacements are part of Anonymous' protest effort against BART.

Californiaavoid.org as of 12:40 PM Pacific on Sunday.

For a brief period, BART posted two news releases on its Web site, one advising customers that its Web site could be attacked and go offline Sunday afternoon, another warning of possible interruptions to train service due to Anonymous' planned peaceful, in-person protest during Monday evening's rush hour. As of this writing, both releases are no longer visible, and BART.gov remains online almost an hour after Anonymous planned to take it down for the remainder of the afternoon.

Anonymous plans to take down BART Web site today

Hacktivist group Anonymous says it will take the Web site of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system off line later today for six hours while also inundating BART fax lines and e-mail accounts. A press release published online detailing the group's plans says the actions are in retaliation for BART's unilateral shutdown of cell phone service Thursday night at some BART stations to prevent another planned protest.

The Thursday demonstration had been planned to protest the fatal shooting of a man by a BART police officer last month. BART officials said they took cell phone service offline in an attempt to disrupt the planned protest, which was to be coordinated via mobile devices, because they worried the demonstration could "lead to platform overcrowding and unsafe conditions for BART customers, employees and demonstrators." An earlier protest last month had disrupted BART service.

Chatter about #OpBART cropped up Friday on Twitter, but few details could be found until plans for a peaceful protest Monday evening outside a central San Francisco BART station began circulating. That was followed with this posting late Saturday of the planned attack on BART's e-mail, faxes, and Web site:

Anonymous will take the following actions over the next 48 hours.
1) We have begun at once a massive Black Fax and E-Mail Bomb action, where we will fill every inbox and fax machine at BART with thousands of copies of our message that this outage was unacceptable
2) Tomorrow, Sunday - August 14, 2011 at High Noon Pacific Time we, Anonymous - will remove from the internet the web site of BART located at www.bart.gov for exactly six hours. That's twice as long as they shut off the cell phones for.
3) On Monday - August 15, 2011 at 5:00 PM Pacific Time there will be a physical protest at the Civic Center Bart Station. Expect us !

BART spokesman Jim Allison said, they are aware of both the planned cyberattacks and Monday's planned protest. He would not elaborate on any plans to deal with either, but said that BART will "continue trying to provide information to our customers [via the BART Web site.]"

Allison says he has not yet heard or seen any evidence of the e-mail and fax "bomb" campaign that the Anonymous release claims is already underway.

As Sunday commuting was just getting underway, at least one sympathetic Twitter account was already reporting support for Anonymous' cause:

"Wow...walking to the @SFBART and I'm starting to see people with masks on. "