Just days into 2012, and Anonymous has already made a new enemy. The group hacked the website of the California Statewide Law Enforcement Association this week, following it up with an info dump containing the personal information of 2,500 members.
According to a Pastebin posting labeled part of Anonymous' ongoing "pr0j3kt m4yh3m," the hacktivists were gunning for info on the organization's members, not just personal emails. They found both.
"We dumped a few of their mail spools and forum databases, and we did get a few laughs out of reading years of their private email correspondence," the group said. "But what we were really after was their membership rosters, which included the cleartext password to 2,500 of their members, guaranteeing the ownage of many more California pigs to come."
One leaked email correspondence between CSLEA Computer and Networks Systems Technician Ken Fair and others illustrated that the organization was well aware of other high-profile hack attacks, including one against San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART).
Last August, Anonymous broke into BART's servers and made off with a user info list which it quickly dumped online. The cyber attack was reprisal for a BART-ordered cellular service outage aimed at disrupting a protest over the shooting death of Charles Blair Hill. Hill was killed a month earlier when he drunkenly attacked a BART police officer.
"If we are being attacked, we can literally unplug from the internet to stop the attack," claimed Fair early last year. "Keeping our membership data completely separate from the website is the safest way we can guarantee our member's sensitive information will not get stolen via the net."
As early as November, Fair and STLi Director Billy Wedlock noticed a server intrusion. But by then it was too late.
Anonymous cited dubious moments in California police history as motivation for the attack, including the death of Oscar Grant in 2009. Grant was also shot and killed by BART police.
"From the murder of Oscar Grant, the repression of the occupation movement, the assassination of George Jackson in San Quinten [sic] prison, the prosecution of our anonymous comrades in San Jose, and the dehumanizing conditions in California jails and prisons today, California police have a notorious history of brutality and therefore have been on our hitlist for a good minute now," said the group.
The next target is the NYPD, said Anonymous, noting its well-documented brutality of Occupy Wall Street protesters. (via Threat Post)
