Kentucky, Arkansas say abortion ban leaks used publicly available data

The state governments of Kentucky and Arkansas stated they launched investigations into information leaks that allegedly came about this weekend and officers from each states imagine the knowledge was already publicly out there.

On Saturday, a gaggle calling itself SiegedSec claimed on Telegram that it was leaking “inner paperwork and recordsdata retrieved from Kentucky’s and Arkansas’ authorities server.” The group stated it hacked the states due to their latest abortion bans.

Kentucky and Arkansas are two of the eight states within the U.S. that instantly banned abortion after the Supreme Court docket overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, a results of “set off legal guidelines” designed to ban the process following the ruling.

The group stated the paperwork included “loads of worker PII and much extra.” They included a 7-8 GB zip file allegedly containing the knowledge and shared a pattern of the paperwork on Telegram. 

“THE ATTACKS WILL CONTINUE! Our fundamental targets are any pro-life entities, together with authorities servers of the states with anti-abortion legal guidelines,” the group stated. 

The messages had been first reported by DataBreaches.web. The group instructed the web site that they took the information in Arkansas from “a server for Arkansas’ Division of Land Surveys” and admitted that the Kentucky information didn’t “look like immediately linked to any company or division.”

Spokespersons for the governors of each states supplied differing responses to the scenario. 

Crystal Staley, a spokeswoman for Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, instructed The File that the Commonwealth Workplace of Know-how (COT) is investigating claims made by the activist group.

“Info pertaining to Kentucky has been recognized and whereas preliminary indications are that that is publicly out there information that doesn’t embrace personally figuring out info, the state will proceed its investigation,” Staley stated in an e mail. 

“Federal legislation enforcement companions have been notified and COT’s info safety officers stay on excessive alert.”

A spokesperson for Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson denied that the leak included any delicate info.  

Shealyn Sowers, Hutchinson’s spokesperson, stated authorities officers “turned conscious {that a} so-called hacktivists group claimed to have accessed and downloaded inner paperwork from the State of Arkansas programs.”  

“After preliminary evaluation, our safety groups have decided that there was no entry past what’s publicly out there and solely public file information was seen or downloaded,” Sowers stated   

“The programs that had been concerned didn’t sit on the State of Arkansas community however quite in a public cloud supplier. We proceed to stay vigilant as we go in regards to the technique of protecting our programs safe.”

Hacktivists have lengthy taken issues into their very own palms however the follow has grown in prominence because the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 1000’s have joined both aspect, concentrating on crucial infrastructure and data-laden authorities organizations with distributed denial-of-service assaults and extra.