14 DAY TRIAL // A disgruntled former employee of a company that provides extra health insurance to French police has uploaded online the personal data of over 112,000 police officers.
The employee uploaded the data on Google Drive, but according to French news agency RTL, it is protected by a password.
The health insurer filed a complaint with Toulouse police on June 2, 2016, which revealed the employee was a woman who worked as a branch manager for Mutuelle Generale de la Police (MGP), an organization that provides extra services, mainly health insurance, to members of the French police.
Employee uploaded the data after she lost her job
RTL mentions that MGP has a history of unpaid premiums, but that the data appears to have been uploaded online after the branch manager was fired from her job. MGP took three weeks to discover the data leak.
According to the complaint, the file uploaded online contains data on active and retired officers and holds information even on their family members. Some of the sensitive details included are cleartext home addresses and telephone numbers.
French Police has contacted Google France and requested that the company take down the data.
Data breaches enhance the risks associated with an already dangerous job
Nicolas Conte, deputy general secretary for SGP-FO, a French police union, told RTL that "it [the incident] is extremely worrying."
The data leak comes just days after a man killed two French police workers, a man (police officer) and his wife (police secretary), at their home in Magnanville, in front of their child.
The Islamic State posted a video online after the murders in which Larossi Abballa, the killer, confessed he was acting on a call to "kill infidels."
While a man like this could pick anyone in the crowd and proclaim them "infidels," having sensitive data leak online would allow attackers to select their targets for maximum impact.