Motherboard reported on Sunday that a hacker managed to get their hands on the personal information of about 30,000 employees for the DHS and FBI, with Wired confirming in its own report the following day that the information has been dumped online, alongside some pro-Palestinian slogans. While the hack isn’t as massive as last year’s Office of Personnel Management data breach, the information that’s been leaked is potentially more sensitive, although the government has been trying to downplay its impact.
A hacker claiming to have downloaded information about thousands of FBI and Department of Homeland Security employees through a Justice Department computer followed through with a threat to publicly release the information online Monday. The data appears to consist of the names, positions, email addresses and phone numbers of an estimated 9,000 Homeland Security employees and 20,000 FBI employees. The online posts, made separately on Sunday and Monday, are accompanied by a pro-Palestinian slogans. The hack was first reported by Motherboard, which quoted the unnamed hacker as saying that he downloaded the data after obtaining access to a Justice Department employee’s email account. The hacker then called a department within Justice claiming problems logging into the agency web portal and was able to obtain the needed login information. Homeland Security spokesman S.Y. Lee said Monday the agency is looking to the potential breach. “We are looking into the reports of purported disclosure of DHS employee contact information,” Mr. Lee wrote in an email. “We take these reports very seriously, however there is no indication at this time that there is any breach of sensitive or personally identifiable information.”
