The Internet’s increasing role in empowering ad hoc protest groups took a new turn this week when hackers supportive of the Occupy Wall Street protests released personal information about former U.S. Treasury Secretary and ex-Goldman Sachs co-chairman, Robert Rubin.

Hackers who have aligned themselves with the online activist group known as Anonymous have been targeting chief executives officers at leading banks, including JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, where Rubin had also serviced as a director and senior counselor, looking for personal information to post to the Internet.

A hacker working under the screenname of CabinCr3w posted a variety of personal information about Rubin, his wife and daughter-in-law in a document linked from its website , including details about where they live, their property values, political contributions and court cases. The incident was initially reported by CNET.

CabinCr3w also published personal and corporate information regarding other Wall Street executives on its own website and the PasteBin web site, including Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan.

While the information was largely confined to publicly available information, it reflected a level of unified support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. That caught the attention of those familiar with the broader landscape of cyber threats who caution that online harrasment could quickly turn into more malicious assaults, and thus be a concern for federal officials.

“One man’s hacktivists is another man’s cyber terrorists,” cautioned Kevin G. Coleman, a senior fellow with the Technolytics Institute, which advises on cyber security and other technology issues.

“There are several groups that have one foot in both camps. With very little case law and few internationally accepted definitions, each and every event must be carefully examined in an effort to decide the proper disposition of the incident. Where this falls depends upon who you ask,” he said.

“Anonymous are like bees, we want to be in control of our honey,” wrote the author behind CabinCr3w in a blog post accompanying information on Moynihan. “The honey in this case, being our financial livelihood, for he did not allow our bees to remove our honey from his bank.’

But the site also took aim at the Federal Reserve, claiming:

“Bank of America dumped $75,000,000,000,000 of junk holdings on the taxpayers of the United States. The Federal Reserve is also a party to this transaction. We will not put up with the government backdoor known as the Federal Reserve rubber stamping all sorts of moves by banks to avoid their own responsibility.”

Rubin served as the 70th United States Secretary of the Treasury during both the first and second Clinton administrations. Before his government service, he spent 26 years at Goldman Sachs eventually serving as a member of the Board, and Co-Chairman from 1990-1992.