Tens of thousands of pages of documents with information on court dockets, traffic tickets, officer interactions and bail hearings dating back to 1998 were accessed in a cybersecurity attack on police in Kingston, Ont., last year. Ontario Provincial Police launched an investigation in January 2025 into a “cyber incident” targeting Kingston Police (KP) on Jan. 1, 2025. Police said the incident affected some IT systems, particularly non-emergency functions. On Friday, Kingston police announced they are “now closing off the cybersecurity incident” and the internal investigation is complete. Police say the analysis shows a “threat actor used compromised account credentials” to access police systems through the Kingston Police VPN application on Jan. 1, 2025. “KP’s investigations were not able to determine how the credential compromise occurred. The intrusion was identified by our Acting Director of IT on January 3, 2025,” police said in a media release. “All systems were shut down within a brief time. By this time, the threat actor had successfully encrypted and extracted 160 GB of data from KP servers.” Data accessed According to police, the 160 GB of data was composed of 345,000 documents, and after analysts culled the documents for duplication and junk, there were 100,000 documents to be analyzed to determine what personal information could be contained. In a media release, police outlined the categories of personal information affected: Police say people may have been affected by the cybersecurity incident if you: Police say experts engaged with the “threat actor,” adding they agreed to delete the data in their possession and to share proof of deletion with Kingston Police. “Since that time, the OPP, and partners from police agencies around the world, have continued to monitor the dark web, and there has been no evidence of disclosure of any of the data extracted in the nine months that have followed the incident,” police said. Police said while officers have assessed the likelihood of misuse of the affected information “to be low,” they recommend monitoring financial accounts and credit card statements for unusual activity, contacting financial institutions if you have concerns about your financial information or contacting a government agency if you believe your government-issued identification may have been compromised. The Kingston Police Services Board has announced plans to invest $3.9 million over the next three years into cybersecurity and improvements to IT infrastructure. Anyone with a question for the Kingston Police can email cyberinfo@kpf.ca.
