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Argentinean Federal Police is investigating a massive data breach by its employees.
In Argentina, law enforcement officials temporarily detained a well-known security researcher and searched his apartment. Javier Smaldone is suspected of hacking into government computer systems and stealing confidential documents, but the researcher himself has a different theory.
Smaldone is a well-known cybersecurity activist in Argentina. He actively opposes the use of electronic voting machines and regularly makes publications on his blog criticizing the government’s decision to resort to them. In 2016, Smaldone even spoke in the Senate of Argentina, campaigning against the use of vulnerable equipment in elections.
According to a researcher at the Perfil news outlet, his housing and the homes of two other security professionals were searched last week after they reported vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines from the Argentinean company Smartmatic. Currently, the government is testing this equipment in order to use it in future elections.
However, according to another Clarin news outlet, Smaldone is one of a number of suspected abductors and 5 GB of personal data from Argentinean Federal Police officers. According to the publication, on October 8 of this year, law enforcement authorities conducted searches in many houses in different cities of the country in search of a hacker known under the pseudonym La Gorra Leaks 2.0.
On August 12, La Gorra Leaks 2.0 published 200 thousand PDF files with personal information of the Federal Police on darknet, Telegram and Twitter. The files contained first names, last names, home addresses, phone numbers, identification numbers and bank details of police officers.
Judging by the court documents published by Smaldon, he is a suspect in the leak, as he was the first to report it on Twitter. In addition to him, the investigation has another detained suspect.