PHOENIX, Ariz. — State police said Friday they are checking security and have launched an investigation to determine the extent of an attack on the police agency's computer system.
The Lulz Security hacking collective claimed Thursday that it successfully accessed the Arizona Department of Public Safety computer system and took data including sensitive case files and the phone numbers and addresses of some officers.
So far, only seven out of DPS' 1,700 employees have had their email accounts compromised and their personal information seized by the group of overseas computer hackers, an agency spokesman said.
"We're concerned that somebody was able to get that far," DPS Capt. Steve Harrison told The Associated Press on Friday. "We don't consider it so severe that it's going to compromise future investigations."
Harrison said it doesn't appear the hackers accessed DPS' main server, but they may have gained entry to a computer that officers use to log onto email accounts and download whatever information was on that computer's hard drive.
Some of the data the hackers may have obtained is information that DPS doesn't want to fall into the hands of drug traffickers and other criminals, Harrison said.
"It could be how drug trafficking organizations work, drug concealment methods – things that we wouldn't necessarily want drug traffickers to know that we know," he said.
State police notified other police agencies after the attack occurred, urging them to apply security measures and protocols to check and secure computer systems in case Lulz attempted to access other police computer systems in Arizona.
DPS has not received any reports of other police computer systems being compromised, Harrison said.
A spokesman for the Phoenix office of the FBI says the agency was aware of the computer hacking situation at DPS.
"At this time we're not confirming or denying that we're involved in the investigation," said agent Manuel Johnson, an FBI spokesman.
The cyber attackers said they were specifically targeting DPS because of the state's tough immigration enforcement law known as SB1070 "and the racial profiling anti-immigrant police state that is Arizona."
The Lulz group also said it planned to release "more classified documents and embarrassing personal details of military and law enforcement" every week, but it was unclear whether other Arizona agencies were targeted.