FOP acknowledges the incident, calls in the FBI to help

Jan 29, 2016 14:10 GMT  ·  By

An unknown hacker breached the computer systems of the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the US' biggest police union, and dumped 2.5 GB of data online.

The data was released online as a torrent file via the Cthulhu website and contained personal information on some of the FOP's members, contracts between police forces and local authorities, and some racy posts made on FOP's private forum. No financial information was included in the data dump.

Cthulhu said that he received the data dump from a hacker who wanted to remain anonymous. He also stated that he got more than 18 TB of data but only chose to release 2.5 GB for now, due to the fact that some of it was labeled as classified or sensitive.

In a statement for The Guardian, FOP's President, Chuck Canterbury, said that the hacker was lying, and this was impossible because the FOP never had 18 TB of data to begin with.

Data still being shared via BitTorrent

The breach seems to have taken place recently, most likely yesterday, when FOP's website went down and remained so up to the moment of writing this article.

The page where the data dump was hosted has now been taken down, but it is still available via Web archive sites. Since there are people still hosting the file via BitTorrent, you can still download the initial 2.5 GB dump. Over 150 people are still sharing the torrent at this moment.

Cthulhu justified hosting the data dump on his server as his way of helping the police cleanse rotten roots.

"The information should not be used to attack the police; it should be used to help them address their problems and correct them. A society cannot be at peace when the citizens and the enforcers of the law are at war," Cthulhu said on his blog.

The hacker may be socially motivated by the recent police brutality cases

We have checked the data dump, and it contains a lot of content that puts US police forces in a bad light. Even if the hacker refused to reveal how and why he did what he did, he might be acting in revenge after the recent wave of police brutality cases and the subsequent media and public backlash.

Some of the criticism in the FOP forum database is aimed at President Barack Obama and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

The FOP is one of the US' biggest unions overall, not just sworn-in police forces, and has over 330,000 members.

We will be updating this post with more information if we manage to find anything interesting in the data dump.

Cthulhu data dump page
Cthulhu data dump page
Content of the data dump
Content of the data dump

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2.5 GB of police data ends up online
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