And so the political fallout and fingerpointing begins?
Suzanne Phan of News10 in California reports that the Peace Officers of California (POC) are demanding a full legislative investigation of the California State Law Enforcement Association (CSLEA) hack by members of Anonymous/AntiSec. Phan identifies POC as a “rival subset” of CSLEA. Jim Sanders elaborates in The Sacramento Bee:
A rival group, Peace Officers of California, jumped into the fray Tuesday by asking the Assembly and Senate public safety committees to investigate circumstances surrounding the theft, including data security measures, CSLEA notification, and whether correspondence or email was obtained that could compromise state investigations.”If you have home addresses, home numbers and other personal information of cops, who knows if someone will follow up and do damage to them or their families?” asked George Osborn, lobbyist for Peace Officers of California, a 450-member subset of the CSLEA that has expressed its desire to split from that union.
News10’s coverage includes the full letter of CSLEA’s notification to members. That letter may not appease those who want to know why they were not notified after CSLEA became aware of the hack in early November. From the CSLEA notification:
[…]
The only personal information that was obtained was old credit card information and corresponding home addresses for orders from the CSLEA online store that were placed years ago prior to the time when CSLEA turned the ordering process over to Wells Fargo Bank which uses encryption of credit card information. Unfortunately, although the credit card info had originally been removed from the CSLEA site, it was inadvertently placed back on the server when the web hosting service restored the site from an earlier version. It is important to note that CSLEA’s membership data base has been maintained separately from the web server and no confidential address information has been accessed by Anonymous or any other entity.
Once CSLEA learned that personal information had been compromised, personal calls and follow-up written notification was made to those affected. Due to some contact information being outdated, CSLEA was not able to speak with all those affected and several letters were returned due to bad addresses.
Although the CSLEA Board of Directors was notified at the time of the breech (sic) that it had occurred, it was decided that no generalized publication of the hack would be made in order to prevent any anxiety on the part of those who had not had their personal information compromised. CSLEA then took steps to change the website password and the email server passwords and also upgraded its firewall to guard against future attacks. Because Anonymous had placed a shell on CSLEA’s website server it was able to continue to have access to the CSLEA web site.
Although on New Year’s Eve Anonymous took access to the site and released the confidential information it had obtained in November, it does not appear that any additional breech (sic) of personal information has occurred. CSLEA will be renotifying the members who had their credit card information accessed in November of what has transpired since CSLEA’s previous notification. Also, CSLEA will be changing web hosting services to a company that can assure greater security, though no company is immune from unauthorized access.
It’s interesting that CSLEA confirms part of Anonymous’s claims – specifically that Anonymous was able to reaccess the site despite the change in passwords.
It’s also interesting to note that this breach seems to have cost STli Web Solutions their hosting contract.