The Anon Verdict hacktivists from Anonymous leaked personal information of around 52 Cincinnati Police Department employees on Sunday — Motive: Death of Paul Gaston.
The group revealed in a video that it has acquired personal details of dozens of Cincinnati police employees from rank-and-file officers to Chief Issac. The 3-minute long video was posted on YouTube by the group in which it was claimed that the data dump act was a response to Paul Gaston’s death who was killed by Cincinnati police officials on Wednesday last week. The transcript of Anonymous’ video can be checked out here.
The Leaked Information:
The personal details exposed by the hacktivist group contain sensitive information like names, age, street addresses, social media accounts of the police officials and email addresses. Moreover, the names and addresses of family members of some of the officers were also released by the group.
Anonymous Declare cyber war on the Cincinnati Police against the shooting and killing of Paul Gaston
Lt. Steve Saunders from Cincinnati police states that the incident is under investigation by the department. It is yet not confirmed that the breach has occurred, who could be behind this attack and what are the risks that have been generated for the police employees by this hack.
Lt. Saunders explained that it is also possible that the hackers acquired information from sources that are open to public viewings such as on public records sources and social media channels. However, Pastebin has deleted the posted data which points out the fact that it may contain sensitive information as claimed by the hacktivist group.
Pastebin removed the link pretty quick of the #DataDump on #CincinnatiPolice but the back up is still up https://t.co/fLjwHotdcI
— #AnonVerdict (@Anon_Verdict) February 22, 2016
The incident between Cincinnati police and Gaston was recorded by bystanders in their cell phones. One such video footage was released by the police.
Anonymous has now warned that if similar incidents occur in the future then many more officers’ details will be released in a similar manner.
This is not the first time when Anonymous has attacked a police department against shooting and killing of a civilian. Last year, during operation Ferguson, Anonymous targeted Ferguson police and KKK members against the shooting of an unarmed teen.
![The leaked database was discovered on Shodan on May 14th.[wp_ad_camp_1][hlink][/hlink]A huge online database containing private contact information including phone numbers and email IDs of roughly 50 million Instagram profiles including those of influencers and brands has reportedly been discovered by security researcher Anurag Sen. The affected individuals include famous food bloggers and celebrities too apart from social media influencers. This database, which belongs to Chtrbox reportedly contains 49 million records was hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services) and got exposed because it wasn’t protected with a password. Chtrbox is a Mumbai-based marketing firm that connects social media influencers to brands looking to market their products.See: Facebook: Storing Instagram passwords in plain text & harvesting your emailsEvery single record in the exposed database contains data belonging to social media influencers’ accounts and in some cases, even the account location is also mentioned. Each account has different worth depending on the number of followers, reachability, and engagement on the platform.[wp_ad_camp_1][hlink][/hlink]Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch contacted Chtrbox to inform about the exposed database, and it was eventually removed. It must be noted that Anurag claimed to discover the exposed database on Shodan on May 14th but in a statement issued by Chtrbox stated that the database was only exposed for 72 hours and contained no personal data.Whittaker also tweeted on Chtrbox's statement and called it "inaccurate."On the other hand, the Instagram spokesperson stated that they are figuring out the issue in order to understand whether the data actually is of Instagram accounts or of other sources."We're also inquiring with Chtrbox to understand where this data came from and how it became publicly available," the spokesperson told TechCrunch.[wp_ad_camp_1][hlink][/hlink]Whittaker claims that the information in the database must have been scraped from various publicly available social media accounts as it also included data such as the cost of a particular post and number of likes, etc. Moreover, some of the influencers claim that they aren’t associated with Chtrbox.See: Russian Hackers Control Malware via Britney Spears Instagram PostsFacebook, which owns Instagram, told TechCrunch that it is reviewing the matter. It is worth noting that Instagram doesn’t allow account scraping while Chtrbox claims that its client base boasts of over 184,000 Instagram influencers. This number is much less than the number of records found in the exposed database.Previously, hackers were found compromising and holding several Instagram influencers accounts for ransom - In the other case, personal data of top celebrities on Instagram was stolen and traded online while several dark web marketplaces were also seen selling Instagram data of 6 million celebrities.Did you enjoy reading this article? Like our page on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.](https://www.hackread.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/database-with-millions-of-instagram-influencers-leaked-online-1.jpg)
