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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

WikiLeaks next target could be Bank of America









Bank of America is thought to be the next target of the WikiLeaks website, according to a new report.

In a Monday interview with Forbes Magazine, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said his organization's next document dump would concern a major American bank.

Assange did not tell Forbes which bank WikiLeaks would target, but he has said in the past that his site accessed critical information from Bank of America.

MORE: WikiLeaks Founder Gives First Interview

In an October 2009 interview with tech news website Computerworld, Assange said the organization obtained large amounts of data from the hard drive of a Bank of America executive, The New York Times noted.

“At the moment, for example, we are sitting on 5GB from Bank of America, one of the executive’s hard drives,” he told Computerworld. “Now how do we present that? It’s a difficult problem. We could just dump it all into one giant Zip file, but we know for a fact that has limited impact. To have impact, it needs to be easy for people to dive in and search it and get something out of it.”

In a statement to The New York Times, Scott Silvestri, a Bank of America spokesman, said: “More than a year ago Wikileaks claimed to have the computer hard drive of a Bank of America executive. Aside from the claims themselves we have no evidence that supports this assertion. We are unaware of any new claims by Wikileaks that pertain specifically to Bank of America.”

Shares of Bank of America were down more than 3 percent Tuesday to $10.97 on the news.

Earlier this week WikiLeaks leaked more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables that revealed, among other things, that Saudi Arabia repeatedly pushed Washington to attack Iran in order to stop its development of nuclear weapons.

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