Confidential Terrorist Data of Europol Exposed Online By One of Its Employees

According to Zembla (A Dutch Television Program), Europol exposed it’s confidential terrorist data online. Leaked data belongs to more than 54 police investigations, which had been conducted by Europol against all that suspects, which are involved in terrorist activities. The leaked data contains names and contact numbers of suspects. Not a single external threat is involved in this data leak. All this happen from the inside of Europol. According to various reports, an employee of Europol accidently did it. But it is not clear yet that he did it by mistake or intentionally.

What Mistake He Did?

The employee who did it is an experienced police officer from a national authority. He copied that sensitive data to a USB device and accessed it on his personal home computer. All the files were unencrypted and he saved the data without any password. When he connected his computer to the internet, someone steals all the data and leaked it online. Maybe, attackers were already tracking all the activities of that employee. It is also possible that he was using any vulnerable application or plugin. But the thing is, he violated the policies of Europol by copying data to a personal storage device. Not one or two, he copied 700 pages of data from Europol’s internal servers.

Leaked Data Contains Following Information

More than hundred names of Suspects

Names of Suspects

Madrid Bombing Attacks

Cases that have never been made public by Europol

Europol’s Take on This Incident

Europol has confirmed the incident and said that this data has been exposed just because of human error. There is no involvement of external illegal activity in this data leak. Europol said that an investigation is going on to identify that what happened in actual. One of Europol’s spokesperson (Jan Op Gen Oorth) said that uploading data from Europol’s servers to personal devices is totally a violation of Europol’s policies. The concerned person is an experienced police officer from national authority and working with Europol from a long time.

Europol is doing an investigation with the help of national level authorities to know the exact incident. The current information of investigators is indicating that it was just a mistake. The security breach was not ill-intended because they haven’t found any malicious activity on the server. Europol is using strict security policies to prevent its data but it is not possible to protect data from such type of human errors. The security team is also investigating that how many people have accessed the leaked data but nothing is clear at this moment. Europol hasn't disclosed anything about the actions which they will take against the offender.

Similar Articles: