Anonymous hacked the US Department of State hours after experiencing the defacement and hacking of their Twitter account by an unknown rival group.

The Anonymous twitter account "has suffered an embarrassing breach, as one of its popular Twitter feeds is taken over by rival hacktivists," BBC News reported.

Allegedly, the hack resulted from poor password practices, such as using weak passwords or using the same password across multiple web accounts.

The hack of Anonymous's twitter account mirrors other high-profile Twitter feeds that have been occurring recently.

Burger King and Jeep are two such companies that have been just hacked by the Anonymous rival.

Despite the Twitter hack, Anonymous resumed their version of cyber-activism hours just hours after their account was breached.

Anonymous hacked into the U.S. State Department web site. They were able to obtain the personal data of hundreds of State Department employees.

The anonymous hacking group then posted the previously classified information online.

Anonymous released the private information on the ZeroBin web site. The data includes private and work e-mails, phone numbers and address of State Department employees.

Anonymous claimed that the hack on the U.S. State Department is retaliation for the arrest of members from LulzSec.

Anonymous hackers posted on ZeroBin, "Our reasons for this attack are very simple. You're imprisoned or either censored our people. We will not tolerate things as such. You don't see us going around censoring everything that is inappropriate or we do not like. Basically, you tried to put an end to us and you got owned, there's nothing more you can say or do. You took away Topiary, Avunit, Neuron, Pwnsauce, lolsoon, Arron Swartz, shall we go on?"