Friday, August 19, 2011

BART Police Database Hacked by Anonymous #OpBART

Database with information about the members of the police BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is exposed by anonymous hackers in the #OpBart operation.

The database, published on Pastebin, contained information on names, addresses and accounts for more than 100 police officers. The Pastebin also contained a link to the campaign OpBart that is executed by Hacktivist group Anonymous.

The reason behind Anonymous operation is “censorship” of the subterranean cellular voice and data network in San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) while people protesting about the fatal shooting of a homeless man by BART(Bay Area Rapid Transit) police.

Anonymous user database attacked BART before. During the campaign OpBart published data on the 3000 accounts of the police obtained from the site MyBart.

The group argues that they protest the recent shootings, organized by Bart Police, as well as the agency’s decision to disable wireless connections to disrupt the protests in San Francisco.

While the Police Officers Association website BART (BART Police Officer’s Association) was unavailable, the agency published a message on their official website, which condemned the attack.

“We condemn this latest attack on the working men and women of BART,” interim general manager Sherwood Wakeman said in a statement. “We are deeply concerned about the safety and security of our employees and their families. We stand behind them and our customers who were the subject of an earlier attack. We are deeply troubled by these actions.”

No matter who carried out this attack securing the data is one of the most important steps that we should care about, if we have such sensitive information we need to keep them offline so no one can have them. Or we need to have a security audit and periodic penetration test to have a clear idea if our databases are vulnerable to attack or not.

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