police hacked | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A group of hacktivists and transparency advocates has published a massive 269 GB of data allegedly stolen from more than 200 police departments, fusion centers, and other law enforcement agencies across the United States. Dubbed BlueLeaks , the exposed data leaked by the DDoSecrets group contains hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents from the past ten years with official and personal information. DDoSecrets, or Distributed Denial of Secrets , is a transparency collective similar to WikiLeaks, which publicly publishes data and classified information submitted by leakers and hackers while claiming the organization itself never gets involved in the exfiltration of data. According to the hacktivist group, BlueLeaks dump includes "police and FBI reports, bulletins, guides and more," which "provides unique insights into law enforcement and a wide array of government activities, including thousands of documents mentioning COVID19. As you can see in the screens...

The  CryptoLocker Malware continues to spread, infected more than 12,000 U.S computers in one week and threatening millions of computers in the UK. Just last week, The UK National Crime Agency urge people afflicted by CryptoLocker not to pay ransom, not least because there is no guarantee that they will even receive an unlock key. Not even Police departments are immune to CryptoLocker. In November second week, Massachusetts' Swansea Police Department paid a 2 Bitcoin ($750 that time) ransom to decrypt images and Word documents encrypted by CryptoLocker ransomware . " It gave us 100 hours to pay and it was literally a timer, " said Police Department. " A big red screen comes up with a timer that says you have 100 hours to pay or your files will be encrypted forever. " Malware usually distributed through spam emails, encrypting the user's files on the infected machine and also the local network it is attached to. However, Police Depar...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

12-year-old Canadian has pleaded guilty to breaking into multiple major government and police websites in the name of the hacker collective Anonymous . Surprisingly, this Fifth Grade student wreaked computer havoc during the Quebec student uprising in 2012, traded pirated information to Anonymous for video games. He had not just participated in  DDoS attacks , but also stole information belonging to users and administrators. The court estimates he did $60,000 worth of damage by attacking major government websites included those of Montreal police, the Quebec Institute of Public Health, the Chilean government and some non-public sites. His lawyer also described in the Court that buy saw it as a challenge, he was only 12 years old and was no political purpose. According to Montreal police, the boy also taught others how to hack. The 12 year old was among the several hackers arrested over the Anonymous protest. While others have been arrested in connecti...

An Anonymous Hacker and Online hacktivist who was  responsible for hacking into the City of Springfield's website and others Police websites has been sentenced to 3 years in federal prison. John Anthony Borell III, a 22-year-old man from Ohio with the online handle @ItsKahuna started advertising his exploits using the Twitter and encouraged other hackers to crack websites as part of campaigns run by an Anonymous offshoot called CabinCr3w . Borell admitted to compromising the websites belongs to various Law Enforcement Agencies from Los Angeles, Syracuse, The official city site for Springfield, Missouri and many more.  He also exposed the names and private details of almost 500 police officers after using an automated script to carry out SQL injection attacks on websites belonging to the Utah Chiefs of Police and the Salt Lake City Police Department. Hacker denied involvement in the attacks on April 2012, but later he pleaded guilty to computer fraud charges and agr...