German anti-fascist hackers have broken into the secure forum server of one of the world's largest neo-Nazi groups, Blood & Honour, and copied more than 30,000 pieces of data.

Blood & Honour, founded back in 1987 in the UK by Ian Stuart Donaldson, leader of the notorious skinhead band Skrewdriver, has been banned in Germany since 2000. The Spanish division was closed in 2005 after the arrest of many of its main leaders.

Last week, members of Daten-Antifa managed to break the access codes of the forum and copied roughly 800MB of data, including information that was only available to members.

In a statement the hackers said that the databases of the server was accessed in a "laboriously prepared cloak-and-dagger operation" which involved a "house search".

The data, published online in a special zipformat, includes the IP addressses of 31,948 registrered users and information about at least 500 (possibly even 1,200) German neo-Nazis.

German authorities had previously suspected B&H was used by members of the German neo-Nazi scene. "Some people in the far-right extremist scene are going to get very nervous," Günther Hoffmann from the Center for Democratic Culture told the Frankfurter Rundschau.

However, police may not be able to do anything with the information, because the data was gathered illegally. ®