A police officer and a bomb sniffing dog inspect a car in Los Angeles in 2002. Members of hacker group Anonymous took credit Thursday for an online raid of the Los Angeles Police Canine Association and the posting of personal and potentially embarrassing information.
Members of hacker group Anonymous took credit Thursday for an online raid of the Los Angeles Police Canine Association and the posting of personal and potentially embarrassing information.
"Over the past three weeks, we in the cabin have been targeting law enforcement sites across the United States," hackers said in a message atop a file at Pastebin.com containing officers' addresses, phone numbers and more.
"Be it for injustices they have allowed through ignorance or naivety, taken part in, or to point out the fact that their insecurity failed to protect the safety of those they took an oath to serve," the group said of its motives.
An Anonymous feed on Twitter boasted of the group hacking the Los Angeles County police and sheriff's department databases and supplied a link to purportedly purloined data made public at file-sharing site Pastebin.
The hackers claimed to have gotten the addresses of more than 1,000 officers along with information from police warrants and court summonses as well as about informants in their weeks-long series of attacks on police computers.
"In all of this information, the large amount we have seen, none of it has been as disturbing as what we found in this most recent target," the hackers wrote.
They said that one officer's email box contained potentially inappropriate pictures of children.
Anonymous law enforcement targets in recent weeks have included the websites of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
(c) 2012 AFP
