Hackers nip at LA police canine group
Group claims to have found objectionable photos of children in officer's e-mails after breaking into police Web site and stealing passwords and other data.
Hackers today released names, addresses and phone numbers of more than 100 officers whose information was pilfered from the Web site of the Los Angeles County Police Canine Association.
LACPCA President Tony Vairo confirmed to CNET that the group's site was hacked and said that the FBI had notified him of the breach. He said he could not comment further.
The hackers also claimed to have found what they described as a couple of objectionable photos of children in the private e-mails of a police officer whose account they were able to access because he purportedly used the same password as he did on the LACPCA site. The hackers said they were reporting the e-mail content to the appropriate organizations protecting children from online exploitation. The officer accused by the group did not immediately return an e-mail seeking comment.
The hackers did not identify themselves but referred to the "cabin," and the Twitter account of the hacker group CabinCrew publicized the data leak in a post this morning.
"Over the past three weeks, we in the cabin have been targeting law enforcement sites across the United States, be it for injustices they have allowed through ignorance or naivety, taken part in, or to point out the fact that their insecurity failed to protect the safety of those they took an oath to serve," the hacker statement on the Pastebin site said.
"In this venture," the statement continued, "we have obtained the names and addresses of over 1000 officers, over fifteen thousand police warrants, hundreds of thousands of court summons, over forty thousand social security numbers of citizens proving the police lack of care for the security of the citizens, anonymous tips of criminal informants pertaining to narcotics, criminal informant information and thousands of online police reports."
Hackers, typically under the banner of "Anonymous," have been targeting big corporations, repressive regimes that are thwarting pro-democracy movements, and government officials and law enforcement agencies in the U.S. since last year.