Hackers ‘Dox’ Miami Police Officers With Data Stolen From Government Database

A group of hackers has dumped the names, phone numbers and email addresses of more than 80 police officers from Miami, Florida, in what appears to be an attempt to "dox" the agents.

The hackers appear to be loosely affiliated with the group of alleged teen hackers, known as "Crackas With Attitude" or CWA, who broke into the AOL email account of CIA Director John Brennan last year, and targeted other high-profile US government officials in recent weeks.

The list of names appears to be legitimate, and includes full names, work phone numbers, emails, and titles, but no home addresses or Social Security numbers. The agents in the list belong to several departments, including the Miami Police Department, the Miami-Dade Police Department, and the Miami Beach Police Department.

It's unclear where the hackers got the data, but it likely comes from a US government database of law enforcement officials that was reportedly breached last year. In early November, the CWA hackers claimed to have gotten into a series of government portals where they got a database of law enforcement agents.

The hacker who published the data and tweeted it out said they got it "directly off of the feds servers."

In an online encrypted chat I asked the hacker, who goes by the name Lord Bashtien, if that meant they got it from the servers of the local Miami police departments. "No bro haha. Federal servers," the hacker told me.

When I asked him if this was part of the breach of the law enforcement portals from last year, the hacker simply answered with a smiley face: ";)"

On Nov. 5, hackers from CWA published a list of more than 2,000 names from that database. Ten days later, they released a second list, this one containing information of 1,500 agents. The two lists appeared to be incomplete, as the names were listed in alphabetical order, but there were only names starting with the letters A, B, and C.

The list of Miami officers is formatted the same exact way, but contains names starting with almost all letters of the alphabet. This new list seems to indicate that the hackers who broke into the law enforcement database last year didn't publish all the data they found, and they might even have more. This dump could mean that the hackers still have more data they stole last year, and, for some reason, they haven't released it yet.

This new list "proves they have a lot more of at least that database," said Michael Adams, an information security expert who served more than two decades in the US Special Operations Command, and has been following the exploits of the hackers since last year. "It shows they have access to a lot more goddamn information than they showed before."

Lorde Bashtien said they targeted Miami officers in particular because some friends and he had been "targeted" by the Miami police last year, after a shooting at a house they rented. Bashtien did not provide many details of the shooting, and Motherboard wasn't able to verify what incident, if any, it refers to.

In any case, Lorde Bashtien appears to have been taunting the Miami Police for weeks.

The Miami-Dade Police Department did not respond to a request for comment. But it appears at least somebody inside the Miami Police Department is aware of the breach.

Gilberto Perez, a detective with the Miami Police Department, said in a phone call that he had already been contacted by another agent regarding the list, but couldn't provide more information, and referred me to the public affairs office.

For Adams, the most surprising thing in this whole story is the fact that all these hackers are still loose.

"It's just absolutely stunning to me that the fucking FBI can't catch these guys," he said in a phone interview. "After all these time, all these months, they still have more data and the fucking FBI can't catch them, really? And yet [the hackers] can pick up the phone and call half the people in the goddamn federal government."

The FBI declined to comment.