Identities of undercover agents working for the Australian Federal Police (AFP) have been revealed after hackers from the Guacamaya group leaked documents they had stolen from the Colombian government.
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The leak comes from a hacktivist group called Guacamaya and includes more than five terabytes of classified data, including emails, documents and methods used by AFP agents to stop drug cartels from operating in Australia.
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The details revealed come from 35 AFP operations, some of which are still active, and include surveillance reports from agents, phone call recordings and payroll data for Colombian officers.
The AFP is not the only law enforcement agency working with the Colombian government, so it is possible that police agencies from other countries will also be affected.
AFP confirmed the breach to The Sydney Morning Herald by sharing the following statement:
The AFP is concerned about potential operational security breaches as a result of this data breach. The AFP is working with its partners in the affected areas to mitigate any potential threats to human security.
Who is the Guacamaya team?
Guacamaya describes itself as a group of hacktivists fighting against oppressive and corrupt regimes in Latin America.
In September, Guacamaya announced that it had breached multiple government, military, and law enforcement agencies and shared the data with a whistleblower news website.
The site shared samples of the data with the general public and provided the full collection only to journalists. However, there is no way to verify whether the hackers distributed the leak to other parties.
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Among the victims are the Chilean Armed Forces, the Peruvian Army, the Joint Command of the Armed Forces of Peru, the Armed Forces of El Salvador, the National Civil Police of El Salvador, the Secretariat of National Defense of Mexico and the General Command of the Military Forces of Colombia.
The hack that compromised the AFP targeted the Colombian Attorney General's Office, an AFP partner that allowed undercover operations to be conducted in Australia to combat drug trafficking and importation channels into the country.
Information source: bleepingcomputer.com
