Dutch police leak leaves data of 62,000 officers in hands of hackers


Police are continuing to investigate the impact of a data leak last week in which hackers obtained the “work-related contact data of all police officers”.

The Dutch national police force employs some 62,000 officers. According to an email sent to staff at the weekend, police chief Janny Knol an “office account” was hacked revealing names, email addresses and phone numbers. How the hackers gained access is still unclear. It is possible that one of the officers fell for a phishing scam, director of security firm ESET Dave Maasland told the NRC. But it could be a “clever hacker who may or may not be in the Netherlands” or even “a foreign government”, he told the paper.

Read more…
Source: DutchNews


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • Dutch Research Council (NWO) confirms ransomware attack, data leak

    February 26, 2021

    The recent cyberattack that forced the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to take its servers offline and suspend grant allocation processes was caused by the DoppelPaymer ransomware gang. The hackers gained access to NWO’s network on February 8 and stole internal documents, threatening with leaking them unless the organization paid a ransom. Since NWO does not cooperate with ...

  • Many problems with cyber security of Schipihol’s border control: Court of Audit

    April 20, 2020

    Schiphol is very vulnerable to cyber attacks, the Court of Audit concluded after investigating the cyber security of the border control systems the Koninklijke Marechaussee uses at the airport. Two of the three systems are not properly protected against cyber attacks, NOS reports. Systems at Schiphol are hardly ever tested for how well they can stand ...

  • Dutch police take down 15 DDoS services in a week

    April 10, 2020

    In a press release published today, Dutch police said they have successfully taken down 15 DDoS-for-hire services in the span of a week, as part of one of their most successful crackdowns against online DDoS service providers. The DDoS-for-hire websites, also known as DDoS booters or DDoS stressors, allowed users to sign up and launch DDoS ...

  • Dutch government loses hard drives with data of 6.9 million registered donors

    March 11, 2020

    The Dutch government said it lost two external hard disk storage devices that contained the personal data of more than 6.9 million organ donors. The hard drives stored electronic copies of all donor forms filed with the Dutch Donor Register between February 1998 to June 2010, officials from the Dutch Minister of Health, Wellness, and Sport ...

  • Dutch police take down hornets’ nest of DDoS botnets

    October 2, 2019

    Dutch police have taken down this week a bulletproof hosting provider that has sheltered tens of IoT botnets that have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacks around the world, ZDNet has learned. Servers were seized, and two men were arrested yesterday at the offices of KV Solutions BV (KV hereinafter), a so-called bulletproof hosting provider, ...

  • Germany and the Netherlands to build the first ever joint military internet

    June 28, 2019

    Government officials from Germany and the Netherlands have signed an agreement this week to build the first-ever joint military internet. The accord was signed on Wednesday in Brussels, Belgium, where NATO defense ministers met this week. The name of this new Dutch-German military internet is the Tactical Edge Networking, or TEN, for short. This is the first time ...