A huge number of emails and other documents from the University of East Anglia had recently been compromised and pilfered thanks to a data breach on the online databases of the institution's Climate Research Unit (CRU). The CRU is considered as a world-renowned authority when it comes to temperature reconstructions and is also one of the three major climate research centers within the United Kingdom.

The CRU has declined further comment on how it would specifically handle the recent IT security disaster. A spokesman from the unit merely addressed that the staff of the CRU are aware that data from their servers used for research information in one part of the university has been made public by reprehensible cyber criminals who posted them on the Internet. Because of the sheer volume of the info, the CRU cannot confirm or deny that the posted data is partly or wholly bogus.

A Russian FTP server had a sixty-one megabyte zip file posted on it late last Thursday. It contained over three thousand items such as data files and source codes as well as over a thousand emails from the CRU researchers. The archive also included puerile annotations attached to the email addresses and a rough cartoon sketch of skeptical scientists, which suggests that the hacker hooligans who perpetrated the breach roamed wide across the university servers.

The spokesman who confirmed the CRU penetration (and the fact that staff files and documents have been made public) was rather equivocal in regards to whether or not the University of East Anglia is seeking to stop further propagation of the compromised data. However, he did acknowledge that the school is presently undergoing a "thorough internal investigation", has removed the invaded server from operation, and has requested for official police assistance on the matter.

This isn't the first time that the CRU has been in the eye of a controversy storm; to be more precise, its role in maintaining the archive of temperature data and developing global temperature reconstructions has had a great influence on the so-called "Hockey Stick" hullabaloo. In fact, their latest temperature reconstructions downplay historical periods of warm weather and characterized post-1980 temperatures as abnormally warm.