Three police departments were recently attacked in three different nations.
According to BBC news, the police and reserve bank of Australia were hacked following a rise in diplomatic tensions over alleged spying by the Australian government on Jakarta officials. Reports of the spying allegations came out in Australian media from documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, which revealed that Australian spy agencies named Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the first lady, the vice-president and other senior ministers as targets for telephone monitoring. The alleged spying took place in 2009, under the previous Australian government.
Following this, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Australia’s Reserve Bank confirmed that their sites were victims of a cyber attack on Wednesday night and both were investigating.
Meanwhile in Syria, the secret police were hacked after a source told Forbes that their systems “were left open to public view”. According to this source, a lot of the traffic was to adult websites as well as records of the web traffic of a majority of the Syrian population.
Finally, the police department of Swansea, Massachusetts was broken into and had files held by ransomware. According to WHDH, the hackers demanded a payment of bitcoins worth about $750 to the unknown hackers and the attack was done via a spear phishing attack. The Swansea Police Department has since upgraded their computer security systems.
