Hackers post contracts for largest US police union

Hackers on Thursday leaked troves of private documents belonging to America’s largest police union.

The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which represents over 325,000 law enforcement officers in the U.S., said the digital assailants had cracked the organization’s website.

{mosads}“The data breech [sic] is a complete breech [sic] of our data and they have posted some of the data on Twitter,” National FOP President Chuck Canterbury said on the group’s Facebook page.

Canterbury said the hackers had only leaked bargaining contracts made with regional authorities. These contracts include agreements on holiday pay, department badge purchases, motorcycle cleaning and sick leave, according to a Motherboard analysis of the data.

Some of these bargaining deals have also drawn criticism for protecting police from prosecution or disciplinary action for using excessive force, The Guardian reported.

Multiple reports indicated the release also included the names and addresses of officers, as well as some emails and forum posts. But Canterbury told The Guardian that no sensitive personal information, such as financial data, had been taken.

The FOP website has been taken down following the hack and was unavailable Friday morning.

In his post, Canterbury blamed the hacking group Anonymous for the breach and said the attack “appears to have originated outside of the United States.”

Anonymous has not taken credit for the digital theft.

One of the major Anonymous-affiliated Twitter feeds even distanced the hacking collective from the incident.

“Hey FOP, don’t claim this was Anonymous, the source of the data has not been identified at all,” it tweeted.

Canterbury said the FBI had launched an investigation into the incident, but the bureau did not comment.

“Our professional computer experts have identified how the hackers made access but that information cannot be distributed at this time for obvious reasons,” Canterbury said. “Suffice it to say that the level of sophistication was very high.”