As protests continue to proliferate across the globe in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the Minnesota Police Department is making news for something else: A supposed hack, perpetrated at the hands of the Anonymous hacktivist group. According to Troy Hunt at Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), the group of allegedly ill-gotten email addresses and passwords has been circulating in multiple forums, with most of them attributing the credential leak to Anonymous, which is a loose affiliation of individuals that carry out hacking to send political messages. According to multiple social-media posts, Anonymous supposedly carried out the breach/leak in response to the MPD’s role in Floyd’s death.
However, Hunt’s review of the situation comes to a different conclusion.
“Don’t spread disinformation and right now, all signs point to just that – the alleged Minneapolis Police Department ‘breach’ is fake,” he wrote, in an analysis posted on Monday, adding that the data is likely not from the MPD at all, but rather a collection of widely available credentials from earlier breaches, and possibly some made-up combinations, that have been assembled into a new database for the purpose of perpetuating this hoax.
Source: ThreatPost