Information leaked from Montreal police SPVM website not sensitive and already public
Wed, Mar 20: Terry Cutler CTO and Certified Ethical Hacker with Digital Locksmiths discusses the potential data breach at SPVM revealing sensitive information which was confirmed to be fake by Montreal Police.
The information pulled off the Montreal police’s website and put into a Dropbox by an unknown individual or group this week wasn’t sensitive to begin with, said Montreal police spokesman Cmdr. Ian Lafrenière. The names, job details and office phone numbers of about 100 employees were posted online in a free file-sharing program. But Lafrenière said the details released are not sensitive and were already publicly accessible on the Internet. “It’s information that you can gather yourself,” he said. “It’s not even a secret, it’s not even illegal, but putting all that together in a Dropbox — for us, we consider that as intimidation.” Though he said it may not have been illegal to gather the information, making it available in one location, accompanied by pictures of people named by the group as undercover officers, amounts to police intimidation — which is illegal. “There is an investigation because this is clearly intimidation,” Lafrenière said. He said the pictures in the Dropbox were not of undercover agents, but rather just ordinary people presumed by those behind the attack to be officers. “I got bad news for them: a lot of pictures they put there, it’s not even a police officer. We know these people and they are not police officers,” he said.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2013/03/20/montreal-police-spvm-website-hacked.html
Terry Cutler is a co-founder of Digital Locksmiths, Inc.(http://www.digitallocksmiths.ca) — an IT security and data defense firm based in Montreal — and serves as the company’s Chief Technology Officer. Terry’s career in the IT security space prior to his joining Digital Locksmiths has been long and distinguished. He was most recently a Premium Support Engineer for Novell in Canada where he analyzed network vulnerabilities and transitioned security technologies into production, and before that he held digital security leadership roles with a number of large corporations. Through the International Council of Electronic Commerce Consultants (EC-Council), Terry earned the rank Certified Ethical Hacker in recognition of his having mastered a range of industry best practices to thwart hackers by knowing how they think and operate from the inside out. In addition to being a licensed private investigator in Canada, Terry is an active member of both the High Technology Crime Investigation Association and the Center for Internet Security. An internationally known author, trainer, speaker, and security consultant, Terry has appeared in numerous television and radio programs and is very active on the conference circuit. More at https://www.terrycutler.com
