By Ron Benvenisti. After being compromised, several agency sites were taken down to evaluate security. Police departments in Texas were among targets of cyber-attacks by the infamous Anonymous group. All had confirmed the email accounts of some of their officials had been compromised, but said they “believed” their departmental servers were not.

Anonymous took over the Texas Police Chiefs Association on Thursday, replacing its home page with a bogus one that listed over two dozen Texas law enforcement officials, names including police chiefs personal and work email accounts which had been hacked.

James McLaughlin, the association’s executive director, said its real website went offline late Thursday night and didn’t know when it would be put back up online. Some of those listed were association members and others were not. He said their website is password-protected for members, and only lists names and contact information.

“Technology is great. We just keep doing more and more good things with it and like anything else, more and more bad things come along,” said McLaughlin, who said the association had contacted the FBI.

As is routine, FBI spokeswoman Shauna Dunlap said the agency is aware of the incident but doesn’t confirm or deny investigations.

Investigator Joe Baeza, a spokesman for the Laredo Police Department in South Texas, confirmed at least one email account of Jesus Torres, an assistant chief of police, had been hacked. But technicians believe the police department’s server wasn’t compromised.

It’s imperative for all agencies to heed his words. “Since we depend so greatly on technology, we are all susceptible to these types of breaches,” Baeza said.

Officer Damon Ing, a spokesman for the Saginaw Police Department in suburban Fort Worth, said the work email of his agency’s police chief had been hacked into. But he said “the department’s computer server wasn’t compromised and the hackers didn’t get any critical information.”

“We’re able to learn from such an attack. Our information security policies and procedures will be re-evaluated. But it will not require a dramatic change of our security procedures. It’s basically a non-threat for our department,” he said.

Texas law enforcement officials, most of whom were from police departments in small cities or school district police agencies, were targeted in retaliation for arrests of the hacker group’s supporters and what it sees as harassment of immigrants by authorities in the state.

Dozens of arrests have been made in recent weeks, some of which were the result of a cross-country FBI sting earlier this summer in which 14 alleged cyber criminals were arrested. The claims about the hacking in Texas originated in England as police there arrested two men as part of a trans-Atlantic investigation into attacks carried out by Anonymous and Lulz Security, which is a spin-off of Anonymous.

Many hacked email accounts contain documents detailing complaints against officers or other sensitive internal issues that are generally not made public. Police officials’ Social Security numbers and passwords for various accounts, were posted online as well.

Also posted online were lewd and racial jokes which were confirmed in an examination of the huge volume of data that was publicly exposed.

Among those alleged to have been attacked was David Henley, the chief of police in the North Texas town of Northlake. A document headed “personnel investigation,” purportedly from Henley’s work email account, describes an officer’s use of police computers to download or send material that’s both racially offensive and pornographic.

Northlake Mayor Peter Dewing said an investigation is going on into the alleged hacking and he couldn’t comment, calling the hackers “cowards”. “I personally believe they’re not doing it for any good, but for self-gratification,” he said.

Ray Moseley, the police chief in Hamlin, a small town in west central Texas, said he had not been able to confirm that his email account had been hacked.

“I have turned it over to the FBI. I have taken precautions,” he said. “There is nothing (in the account) that is going to be national security or something like that.”

In August, Anonymous claimed it hacked into 70 law enforcement websites. Sites included Sheriffs’ offices in Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri and Mississippi. The group also claimed responsibility for attacking Visa, MasterCard and PayPal, music industry sites and the Church of Scientology.