Over 800 ALA employees affected, some just don't care

Jun 10, 2016 01:00 GMT  ·  By

The Caliphate Cyber Army (CCA), one of the smaller groups part of the United Cyber Caliphate (UCC), the ISIS de-facto hacking division, has leaked details of 800 library workers from the Arkansas Library Association (ALA).

The data breach took place in the month of May, and CCA members leaked the data in the form of an Excel file on their Telegram channel on May 26.

The FBI, along with various security firms like Kronos and SiTE, all detected and logged the incident. An FBI agent even called the Arkansas Library Association and informed them of the data breach as soon as it happened.

ALA employees more happy that their credit card data wasn't exposed

On May 31, ALA sent out an email to all affected employees, informing them of the incident. The Excel file held information such as real names, addresses and telephone numbers of 800+ ALA employees in various high school and college libraries across the state.

As usual, ISIS militants dumped the data online and asked supporters to carry out lone wolf operations against these targets. A few months earlier, the group did the same thing when they leaked the details of over 3,000 New Yorkers.

In statements to Newsweek, some ALA workers were more glad that their financial details weren't exposed, rather than worry about ISIS attacks.

ISIS hacking crews aren't the most talented hackers you'll find

Previously ISIS crews have hacked a company that contained the term Google in its name and tried to pass it as the real Google, a church's website in Michigan, and 88 random sites in a three-day hacking rampage.

Despite being quite active, ISIS hackers aren't considered to be the most talented crews, rarely achieving anything more than simple defacements or database compromises.

From the looks of the current ALA website, which shows database connection errors, it seems that the hackers got in via an SQL injection attack.

Screenshot of the dumped ALA Excel file
Screenshot of the dumped ALA Excel file

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Arkansas Library Association website showing SQL connection errors
Screenshot of the dumped ALA Excel file
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