Police group members react to Anonymous hacking

news10.net
SACRAMENTO, CA - A day after Anonymous hacked into California Statewide Law Enforcement Association's website, CSLEA members are still learning about the security breach.

Plus, the CSLEA homepage is still down.

RELATED STORY: Thousands affected after Anonymous hacks police union website

The well-known international hacking group released the names, home addresses, and phone numbers of public safety professionals, many of them police officers. It also exposed credit card information on purchases made in their online gift shop.

Anonymous claimed on their post that they have 2,500 names and passwords, and in some cases, credit card numbers. The hacker group justified releasing the information asserting, "California law enforcement officers are notorious for brutality."

Union president Alan Barcelona said CSLEA had information taken in November. All members who had their information breached then were contacted by phone or letter. The letter, dated Nov. 10, "confirms that credit card information of customers of the CSLEA online store had been compromised"

It stated, "Fortunately, most of the credit cards that were compromised had expired." And, it went on to state, "Additionally, all of the information which was previously maintained on the site has been purged."

Teresa Dobbins, an employee of the Department of Justice, never got word of the breach in November. And she wasn't informed that her personal information, including her email address, phone number, and home address, were leaked onto the web New Year's Day, until News 10 contacted her.

"If they were aware of it, they should have tried to notify me before the media did," Dobbins said.

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Cyber attack shows constant threat to key intel

cbsnews.com
(CBS/AP)

The attempted hacking of defense contractor Lockheed Martin once again shined the spotlight on the security of the high-tech infrastructure guarding the United States' most closely held secrets.

The threat of attacks by enemies of the United States on the country's cyber security is one that has been known about for years, officials and experts in the field of national security have said.

(Last year, a former chief of U.S. intelligence told "60 Minutes" that the United States was unprepared for cyber attacks.)

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Joel Brenner, who held the title of national counterintelligence executive from 2006 to 2009, told the Reuters news agency Tuesday that not just Lockheed Martin but most large defense contractors, if not all of them, have had their networks breached.

"This has been happening since the late '90s," he told Reuters before referring to China, Iran and Russia, three countries he said are the American government's main suspects of cyber espionage. "They're after our weapons systems and R&D."

That research and development is of interest to the more than 100 intelligence groups the Defense Department says have tried to crack American cyber security, Reuters reported.

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Cyberattack Drill Shows U.S. Unprepared

informationweek.com
A group of high-ranking former federal officials scramble to react to mobile phone malware and the failure of the electricity grid in a staged exercise.

"Cyber Shockwave," conceived and executed by the Bipartisan Policy Center along with experts in cybersecurity, simulated such an attack on Tuesday -- and discovered that the U.S. is ill-prepared to handle a large scale cyberattack.

In an effort to spur U.S. officials to take cybersecurity more seriously, Cyber Shockwave brought together a group of former high-ranking White House, Cabinet, and national security officials to see how they would deal with such a crisis in realtime. Imagine what would happen if a massive cyberattack hit the U.S., crippling mobile phones and overwhelming both telephone infrastructure and the electricity grid.

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