Members of the Anonymous hacking collective are taking credit for the theft of more than 2.4 million e-mails from Syrian governmental officials and contractors that were later published by WikiLeaks.

The whistle-blower website announced the massive document dump on Thursday. The cache includes communications from 680 Syria-related entities or domain names, including the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport, and Culture, WikiLeaks officials said. In all, the leak includes 2.4 million e-mails sent from 678,752 different addresses to more than 1 million recipients. It comes amid a government crackdown on dissidents that has killed as many as 15,000 Syrians in the past 18 months, according to some estimates.

"The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria's opponents," WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in Thursday's press release. "It helps us not merely to criticise one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it."

According to a separate communication released over the weekend, people affiliated with Anonymous pulled off the "massive breach of multiple domains and dozens of servers inside Syria" that made the WikiLeaks dump possible. The hack took place on February 5 and was so involved that teams worked in shifts around the clock for weeks to pull it off. The downloading of such a large data set required several additional weeks. The announcement provided no evidence to prove the claims were real.

Last week's WikiLeaks dump comes five months after the publication of hundreds of e-mail messages from the webmail server of Syria's Ministry of Presidential Affairs, including messages sent between President Bashar al-Assad and his wife. Saturday's announcement from Anonymous said that February's dump "remained just a tiny fraction of the total data recovered in the original hack."

WikiLeaks officials said they have yet to verify the authenticity of each e-mail acquired, but that they are "statistically confident that the vast majority of the data are what they purport to be."