By Libor Jany and Richard Winton
Los Angeles Times
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LOS ANGELES — A trove of sensitive LAPD records, including officer personnel files and documents from Internal Affairs investigations, are among the materials believed to have been seized by hackers in a breach last month involving the L.A. city attorney’s office.
Some of the records have started surfacing on social media platforms like X. Among the first to post a file from the suspected hack was the account @WhosTheCop, which regularly posts about information related to police accountability.
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The account’s administrator said a security researcher first disclosed the breach in a post that had been taken down by Tuesday afternoon.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the hackers requested a ransom not to release the information and whether the city paid one.
There has been no public acknowledgment of the hack from city or LAPD officials. A department spokesperson did not immediately provide a response to a request for comment.
Under state law, most police officer records are considered private. If authentic, the disclosure represents a stunning breach of police data. Only rarely do Internal Affairs documents surface in civil lawsuits and criminal cases, and even then they are often heavily redacted.
In all, according to posts about the data breach, there were 7.7 terabytes of information available for download and more than 337,000 files. The trove included sensitive records turned over as part of discovery in court cases, such as witness names, health information, unredacted criminal complaints and investigative files.
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