Millions of law enforcement documents—some showing pictures of suspects, bank account numbers, and other sensitive information—has been published on a website that holds itself out as an alternative to WikiLeaks, according to a security news website KrebsOnSecurity.
DDOSecrets, short for Distributed Denial of Secrets, published what it said were millions of documents stolen from more than 200 law enforcement groups around the country. Reporter Brian Krebs, citing the organization National Fusion Center Association (NFCA), confirmed the validity of the leaked data. DDOSecrets said the documents spanned at least a decade, although some of the dates in documents suggested a timespan twice as long.
Dates on the most recent documents were from earlier this month, suggesting the hack that first exposed the documents happened in the last three weeks. The documents, which were titled “BlueLeaks,” were published on Friday, the date of this years Juneteenth holiday celebrating the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in the Confederacy. BlueLeaks had special significance in the aftermath of a Minneapolis police officer suffocating a handcuffed Black man to death when the officer placed his knee on the man's neck for 8 minutes and 45 seconds.
Over the weekend, critics of police abuse took to social media to celebrate the leak and display documents that purportedly came from it. Some of them included:
- An FBI document identifying Twitter posts that “threaten[ed][ law enforcement supporters safety as of May 2020.”
- Motorcycle gangs that opportunistically used protests to pose as members of the antifa movement inciting riots and for the gang to “move large amounts of heroin into the Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, area.”
- Law enforcement personnel tracking potential protestors use of SnoopSnitch, an app that detects when IMSI catchers are being used to monitor cell phone data.
The link hosting the data only sporadically loads and, more often than not, times out before loading the index page. When it does display, the page organizes leaked documents both by the law enforcement agency they came from and often by names of individuals purportedly associated with a document. Once again, clicking on a link more often than not fails to load the document. BitTorrent links have also been made available, but they too fail.
What that means is that most of the world has only seen a small portion of the leak in tiny snippets without the ability to analyze the leak in its entirety firsthand.
The leaks, according to Krebs, are the result of a hack on the sRead More – Source
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