On November 12, @CyberZeist announced on Twitter that the Windham County Sheriff’s Office had been hacked, and that not only was the self-described blackhat giving away the full database, but he was willing to provide backdoor access to the site:
Giving away #Backdoor access to Windham County Sheriff’s Office(https://t.co/dlaEW3AvCc)- https://t.co/F7IfQPf97m #HappyWeekend
— CyberZeist (@cyberzeist) November 12, 2016
DataBreaches.net sent an inquiry and notification to Sheriff Clark on November 12, but has received no response. The data in the paste and dump appear to be genuine, as the individuals could be found via Google searches. Of special note in the data dump was a users table with 300 records of personnel, each with the format:
(`user_id`, `user_number`, `user_name`, `user_pass`, `user_force_pass`, `user_first`, `user_last`, `user_email`, `user_rank`, `user_join`, `user_auth`, `user_last_login`, `user_last_ip`, `user_active`, `user_archive`, `user_display`, `user_county`, `user_type`)
The passwords were MD5 or for per diem employees, plain text. In my notification to Sheriff Clark, I noted:
… someone should probably remind employees when you force a password reset that they should not be using passwords like “Password,” which is what Sheriff [redacted] and Sheriff [redacted] both seem to have used (MD5 passwords are easy to crack).
Of the 300 entries in the users table, 8 individuals had used “password” as their password, and 22 others had used “password1” as their password. DataBreaches.net made no attempt to crack all the passwords, but if those are the kind of passwords that law enforcement personnel used, then a password reset and instructions on creating strong passwords definitely seems in order.
The data dump also included a table with information on the transportation of prisoners. The 3,982 records included names, date of birth and purpose of the transportation in the format:
(`prisoner_id`, `trans_id`, `prisoner_first`, `prisoner_last`, `prisoner_dob`, `prisoner_purpose`, `prisoner_time`, `prisoner_destination`, `prisoner_location`, `prisoner_comments`)
Most of the details or notes seemed fairly routine.
DataBreaches.net asked CyberZeist if he still had access as of today, and he replied that they had secured it and had removed files from their server. When asked how he had originally gained access, he indicated that it was by SQL injection.