Hackers Leak U.S Employees Record At Justice And Homeland Security Depts

The Hacker, on Monday, published contact information for 20,000 FBI employees, just one day after posting similar data on almost 10,000 Department of Homeland Security employees.

Just before the Super Bowl kickoff, the cybercriminal stuck to his word and uploaded a list of 9000 DHS employees. On Monday evening, the personal data of 20,000 FBI agents was also released.

The information, which was published on an encrypted text-sharing site, includes names, titles, email addresses, and contact details. After the hackers published the data on the DHS employees on Sunday, they tweeted, “Well folks, it looks like @TheJusticeDept has finally realized their computer has been breached after 1 week.”

The hacker, who uses the Twitter username @DotGovs, posted a tweet with a link to the dump. It read: “FBI and DHS info is dropped and that’s all we came to do, so now its time to go, bye folks! #FreePalestine.”

The account also posted two screenshots of a web browser logged into a Department of Justice computer.

The people responsible for the breach told Motherboard that they carried out the hack by compromising a Department of Justice (DOJ) email account. They then tricked a department representative into handing over a token code to access the DOJ portal, used the compromised credentials to log into the portal, and gained access to an online virtual machine. From here, the hacker was able to access the databases of DHS and FBI details that were stored on the DOJ intranet.

However, US authorities on Tuesday acknowledged a data breach affecting the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, but downplayed its severity.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security told reporters: “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.”