Los Fresnos Chief of Police James Harris III confirmed this week that he was the victim of a computer hacker group called Anonymous — the name of a high-profile group that last year disabled the websites of some major financial companies.
A second Rio Grande Valley police chief, Roma School District Chief of Police Noe Flores, also was targeted, as were about 20 other Texas law enforcement officials.
On Sept. 1, contents of their email accounts were routed to a hidden server that is available to the public.
“They did get some access to some emails, but at no time did they get access to any of our network or anything like that,” Harris said this week. “There was nothing current.”
The internal police network was not compromised, he stressed.
Harris said he could not provide additional details about the ongoing investigation, but he said the FBI is heading the case.
The FBI did not return request for comment.
Harris referred other inquires to the Texas Police Chiefs Association, whose website was also compromised by the hackers. The TPCA did not return a call requesting comment.
“It’s a shame to say that they did such a thing, but we’re really not making any comments right now because I really don’t want to interfere with any part of an investigation that’s going on or incite anything else,” Harris said.
As of Friday morning, the TPCA’s website was still offline.
According to the hackers, who wrote a long message on their website with summaries of the stolen documents, Harris’ email contained police and Border Patrol operations documents, search warrants, personal tax forms and “several naked picture galleries shared among officers.”
Also according to the hackers, Flores’ email contained “law enforcement sensitive” border security reports and “extremely graphic pictures of murdered federal police and others” and “multiple racist anti-immigrant chain email forwards.”
Phone calls Friday to the Roma school district police department went unanswered.
According to the hackers’ documents, top law enforcement officials across the state were affected by their efforts, from officials in Laredo to the Department of Public Safety’s Garland crime lab to police in towns like Friendswood, Hillsboro, Athens and Port Arthur.
In their message, the hackers said they worked on the project for more than a month. They called the operation “Texas Takedown Thursday” and accused Texas law enforcement of racism, sexism and harassment of immigrants.
“To continue the fighting spirit of WikiLeaks, we want to share the full Texas collection and expose these bumbling fools and all their secrets to the world,” the message read.
In the message they said the attack was also in retaliation for the arrests of suspects belonging to the group and border operations that they said are a cover for “backwards racist prejudice.”
Last year, a group called Anonymous claimed responsibility for attacking and disrupting or disabling the websites of major banking entities like MasterCard, Visa and PayPal in retaliation for the arrest of WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange.
The website with the hacked data — pastebin.com/LGyeLcun — also refers to a hacking attack against the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
