Texas Police Get Screwed By Anonymous Hacktivists

Three gigabytes of emails and other sensitive information from Texas law enforcement agencies has been dumped onto the Internet by Anonymous hacktivists.

In what it called Texas Takedown Thursday, the hacking group’s Chinga La Migra (approximates “Screw The Police”) faction staged the attack, the fourth raid of the campaign.

Calling card explains the exploit

In a message left on the Texas Police Chiefs Association Website, Anonymous said that the action was another part of the response to the arrests of 16 alleged members of Anonymous. The dumping of the data is similar to the treatment meted out to Arizona Police recently.

“In retaliation for the arrests of dozens of alleged Anonymous suspects, we opened fire on dozens of Texas police departments and stole boatloads of classified police documents and police chief emails across the state,” said the Anonymous statement, which has now been removed (see image). “During the San Jose courtdate we defaced and gave out live backdoor and admin access to the Website TexasPoliceChiefs.org while allied ships launched DDoS attacks upon Justice.gov and other law enforcement Websites. For every defendant in the anonymous ‘conspiracy’ we are attacking two top Texas police chiefs, leaking 3GB of their private emails and attachments.”

As the message implies, the hacktivists had opened a backdoor for others to use to steal the data over time. This included personal information identifying officers and passwords for system access. Documents included FBI, Border Patrol, and counter-terrorism tracts marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive” and “For Official Use Only”.

It took site administrators some time to remove the message from the home page of the site. An online tussle with the hackers ensued as they replaced the message and set the police back to square one.

Not backward in publicising their exploits, Anonymous wrote, “One month ago we ‘Shot The Sheriff’ and released 10GB of private law enforcement data while defacing dozens of police department websites in several states in the south. A week ago we released private emails belonging to Richard T Garcia, VP of Texas-based Vanguard Defense Industries, and also a former FBI agent and current Infragard executive board member.”

The message concluded with a call to arms: “Hackers all over the world are uniting to make 2011 the year of hacks and revolutions. Join us, comrades: open fire on governments, law enforcement organisations, white hat, corporate and military targets!”