Law Enforcement Data “Blue Leaker”: A Danger or a Public Service?
The recent release of a massive cache of sensitive Law Enforcement data has been in the news recently. The trove of roughly 270 gigabytes of data posted to the Denial of Secrets website has been referred to as “BlueLeaks.” This is just the latest in a long series of data breaches against government agencies that have revealed sensitive information to the public at large. The collection includes over ten years’ worth of sensitive data and has been verified by the National Fusion Centers Association. Data leaked includes images of people under investigation, sensitive government and law enforcement reports, banking information, and Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
An attacker’s motivation to breach a government source and reveal what he or she finds varies widely. Maybe it’s political – someone trying to further a specific party agenda. Perhaps it’s an activist trying to achieve an explicit civic goal. It could even be a group of rival state actors looking to alter the balance of power for political, diplomatic, or economic gain. There are also criminal organizations with their own goals in mind. Whatever the motive, as information security professionals our role is to try and prevent these breaches from happening in the first place, and to mitigate the damage as much as possible when they do.
The data released by Denial of Secrets was acquired during a breach of a “Fusion Center” operated by Netsential, a web development firm based in Houston, Texas. Fusion centers such as this serve as a clearing house to disseminate law enforcement and public safety information between partners. A Fusion Centers’ typical partners are law enforcement and safety organizations at the federal, state, local, county and tribal levels.
While the timing of this breach makes it especially relevant (during this period of civil tension), it is only unusual in character. Breaches in both the Public and Private sectors that reveal personal, business, medical, and financial intellectual property data result from similar ploys. Attackers rely on comparable tools and techniques to breach any network perimeter. While the details of the Netsential breach are not public, they did confirm that the leak was most likely caused by a compromised user account that allowed the attackers to upload malware. That, in turn, led to the data exfiltration.
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September 14, 2020 at 07:50PM
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Law Enforcement Data “Blue Leaker”: A Danger or a Public Service? - Security Today
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