POLICEONE FORUMS - NOTICE OF DATA BREACH
What Happened
Police1.com has confirmed a 2015 security breach of the Police1 Forums in which hackers were able to obtain data for a small portion of our members. Our forums are a secondary feature on Police1 that run on third-party software and are entirely separate from our main Police1 member database and other systems, which have not been compromised. We have had 20,000 to 30,000 total active users over the past couple of years in our forums. In response, we have taken immediate steps to secure user accounts and our forums, and are working closely with law enforcement.
What Information Was Involved
While we store only very limited user data and no payment information, we take any breach of data extremely seriously and are committed to full transparency regarding the matter as we investigate further. Security is incredibly important to us and has been something we’ve worked hard to continually upgrade over the past 17 years. For potentially affected accounts, the information obtained may include usernames, emails, hashed and salted passwords (ie. additional security on the password you use). Most of the data was from a previous version of the software used from 2000 to 2008. It did not include forums posts or other content.
What We Are Doing
On Friday, we were alerted to the fact that a data broker was attempting to sell Police1 member data obtained during 2015 through a hack of our forums, potentially via a vulnerability in vBulletin, our third-party forum software. We have continued to upgrade our security measures in the past year – including our vBulletin instances – and are thoroughly evaluating our system for any potential vulnerabilities to ensure security of our user data going forward.
While we are still working to validate details regarding the breach, we have taken immediate steps to secure user accounts and our forums, which are currently offline indefinitely while we investigate and gather more information. We are in the process of notifying potentially affected users and are automatically requiring they change their passwords before accessing their account. Any users attempting to log in will likewise be prompted to change their passwords.
What You Can Do
We encourage all Police1 Forums users to change their passwords for any other accounts for which they use the same password as their Police1 account. We also recommend that users avoid clicking links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails and that they be cautious of unsolicited communications that ask for personal information.
If you have any questions about this matter not addressed by this release, please contact our Customer Service department or call us at 1-888-765-4231. This notice was not delayed as a result of a law enforcement investigation.