The website for California’s Statewide Law Enforcement Association (CSLEA) union remained offline Tuesday following the announcement of a hack by well-known hacktivist group Anonymous over the holiday weekend.
In part of what the group has deemed “pr0j3ct m4hy3m,” (project mayhem) Anonymous released approximately 2,500 names, addresses and phone numbers of those affiliated with the union, many of them police officers, according to Sacramento’s News 10. The group also published some of the members’ credit card information taken from the group’s online gift shop.
The hack was made public by a tweet from @YourAnonNews late Saturday: “BREAKING: California Statewide Law Enforcement Agency DEFACED and PWNT by #AntiSec #Anonymous.” A note on the site, also linked to in the tweet and now published on Pastebin, claims that thousands of police user names and passwords had been circulated across Anonymous channels for the two months leading up to the disclosure of the hack.
As Threatpost previously reported, private e-mail correspondence belonging to Fred Baclagan, a special agent with the California Department of Justice, was initially leaked as part of this hack in mid-November.
11 other sites hosted by the CSLEA, like the California Association of Criminal Investigators (CACI) and the California Association of Fraud Investigators (CAFI) also remained offline Tuesday.
According to an interview News 10 did with union President Alan Barcelona, members whose information was breached were contacted in a letter dated Nov. 10, despite Barcelona claiming many of the credit card numbers the breach yielded were expired.
At the end of the note, Anonymous claims police departments in New York will be targeted next.
“For our next owning we bring you multiple law enforcement targets in the state of New York, who has been on our cross hairs for some time due to their brutal repression of Occupy Wall Street.”
The New Year – 2012 – is being ushered in with a torrent of AntiSec headlines, as was its predecessor. This time around, members of the law enforcement community find themselves in the cross hairs. Hackers associated with Anonymous cracked into intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (STRATFOR) on the 25th and spilled personal information on subscribers on the public Internet. Meanwhile the group has continued to pressure companies to stop supporting the the ever-divisive Stop Online Piracy Act.
