Update: for the latest details on the FTC site hacks, see the full report: Plesk control panel bug left FTC sites (and thousands more) exposed to Anons.

Members of Anonymous' "Antisec" collective struck a Web server of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection early on February 17, hacking into and defacing the sites hosted on it.

"The Bureau of Consumer Protection’s Business Center website and the partnership site NCPW run by the Federal Trade Commission were hacked earlier today," FTC spokesperson Cecelia Prewett said in an official statement sent to Ars. "The FTC takes these malicious acts seriously. The sites have been taken down and will be brought back up when we’re satisfied that any vulnerability has been addressed."

The log of the hack, a cut-and-paste from a shell session on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux server, shows the server's directories, the user account names and encrypted passwords stored in its etc/shadow file, and the MySQL databases running on the server. The contents of two of the tables posted in the log dump include the contents of a table with the account names, e-mail addresses, and hashed passwords of what appears to be the users of the server's installations of Drupal and WordPress.

While the websites belong to the FTC, they weren't running in a government-owned data center. According to the IP address data for the server, it was hosted by Media Temple in Culver City, California, and it appears its sites were set up for the FTC by the public relations firm Fleishman-Hilliard. A spokesperson for Fleishman did not respond to requests for comment. Update: Media Temple CMO Kim Brubeck told Ars that her company was unaware Fleishman had intended to use the uservers in its data center for .gov sites, and that she has requested they remove any additional .gov sites.

Based on the claims of the Anon Antisec member who posted the log of the attack to Pastebin.com, the attack was motivated by the FTC's failure to step in to stop Google's changes in its privacy policy, and by the US government's support of ACTA. In the statement, the Anon threatened that "If ACTA is signed by all participating negotiating countries...We will systematically knock all evil corporations and governments off of our internet."