By Police1 Staff
WASHINGTON — The Fraternal Order of Police was targeted by hackers which resulted in a data dump online, NBC News reported.
The unidentified hackers gained access to bargaining contracts and possibly other data in an attack that originated overseas.
“Our professional computer experts have identified how the hackers made access but that information cannot be distributed at this time for obvious reasons. Suffice it to say that the level of sophistication was very high,” FOP National President Chuck Canterbury said Thursday in a Facebook post.
The post announcing the dump said there was a much larger trove of data that has been yet to be made public. The poster, under the alias ‘Cthulhu’ claimed to be a United Kingdom resident and said the data was acquired from an anonymous source.
“I believe the police should have corruption exposed as all other places should also have wrongdoing exposed when they are in a public office,” Cthulhu wrote on the post. “However, the information should not be used to attack the police; it should be used to help them address their problems and correct them. A society cannot be at peace when the citizens and the enforcers of the law are at war.”
The FOP represents more than 325,000 officers in 2,100 local chapters.
Canterbury told the news site the data was “merely bargaining contracts that we have collected and inputed into our data system and those are all available on the open web.”
Canterbury said no financial or sensitive personal information was obtained.However, the FOP made the decision to shut down their entire site as a result of the breach.
The site remained offline Monday morning.