Palm Beach County Police Department Data Breach (2015)

For three long hours Friday morning, thousands of pages detailing secret law enforcement plans to take down local drug and gambling gangs — including the names of confidential informants and undercover agents — were published on the city of West Palm Beach’s official website, Gossip Extra has learned exclusively. Obviously, it was by mistake — but it took frantic calls from police and even the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to get the documents off the website that city officials use to communicate with residents. Over the weekend, Palm Beach County Sheriff’s officials and West Palm Beach Police higher-ups were scrambling to find their confidential informants to warn them of the potentially-deadly security breach. It seems 2,000 emails (8,000 pages) had been intentionally made publicly available on the city’s website, wpb.org, in response to a request from a television station, but the individual responsible for responding to the request had failed to redact the files for sensitive information.