Brazen hackers in Finland, calling themselves “Pirates klo Bay” (Pirates at Bay), have successfully accessed sensitive firearms transaction records from within the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) yesterday, and posted the information on at least one website hosted in neighboring Sweden. The documents, comprised mostly of searchable PDF scans of ATF Form 4473, the so-called “yellow forms” filled out by firearms purchasers in gun shops, sporting goods stores, gun shows and back alleys in the United States, was posted on the Swedish site yesterday and indexed. The site, which has been down since early this morning due to massive internet traffic, was set up so that visitors could search the ATF records by purchaser’s name and personal information, seller’s name and address, firearm type, location, and date of sale.

An unnamed ATF spokesperson confirmed the security breach, stating that the hackers were able to download approximately 80 to 85 percent of the more than 115,000,000 gun-sale forms dating back to 1968 and stored on BATF servers, before the agency’s IT department was able to lock down those servers late yesterday.

In a news release this morning, the irate ATF spokesperson verbally lashed out at the attackers, demanding “we want the little commie reindeer-eatin’ bastards to send back our data right goddamn now, or we’re gonna nuke their frozen wasteland right off the map!”

No one is certain at this time what ramifications will result from the data breach, believed to be even larger than the 2006 Department of Veterans Affairs data loss fiasco, which involved the personal data of over 26 million veterans.

A spokesman for the National Rifle Association has expressed shock and outrage over the incident, calling on government to bolster security of citizens’ gun records. The official stated that the gun-totin’-rights group has “mobilized” and will dispatch email communiques to as many of its nearly 3 million members as possible, warning them of the security breach and advising gun owners to stay at home, lock their doors and load up. But the NRA spokesman conceded that the email warnings would have limited reach, due to the fact that most of the group’s members live in remote locations “that don’t even have electricity or running water, let alone internet access.” The spokesman aimed his own bit of vitriol at the hacker group, warning “those Scandahoovian scoundrels had better watch their backs. There are a few million angry Americans with guns who would love to get them in their sights.”

The effects are believed to be widespread, involving gun owners in all 50 states. The chances of containing the appropriated data are slim, as mirror sites hosting the information are already popping up in places like Romania, Kenya, and Uzbekistan — nations well out of the reach of US law enforcement. So, it appears, the proverbial genie is out of the bottle.

ATF officials have contacted the major internet search engines, asking for their cooperation by not indexing the sites believed to be hosting the stolen content. However, the search companies have not publicly responded to those requests.

The last known reliable site in western Europe sharing the data was believed to operating in a remote fishing village in Lapland. Meanwhile, no one has been able to locate the hacker group, which incidentally has no connections to the similarly-named Pirate Bay, a Swedish peer-to-peer file sharing site. An official with Pirate Bay, who requested anonymity, stated that “our group had nothing to do with the gun information hack. But, damn, we wish we had thought of it first.”