A hacker going by the name “Department of Peace” has published personal data belonging to more than 40,000 U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees, exposing ICE agents, cybersecurity staff and senior officials to potential harassment and violence. TechCrunch reports that the breach happened earlier this year and has not previously been disclosed. The leaked records include names, job titles, work emails, cell phone numbers and office locations for employees across the department, according to data reviewed by TechCrunch, which verified part of the dataset by checking names of known DHS employees against an offline copy of the database.
The hacker claims to have pulled the data from an Okta single sign-on system that DHS employees and contractors use to reach the department’s central network. That system reportedly also stores IT and login records showing which internal apps and systems each employee can access. Timestamps in the data suggest it was taken around mid-August. Roughly 21,000 of the leaked records, more than half the total, belong to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees who work at airports and ports of entry. About 10,000 relate to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its Homeland Security Investigations unit. Just under 1,000 cover staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and thousands more belong to DHS headquarters staff and other component agencies, including U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Federal Protective Service. In total, the leak covers about a fifth of DHS’s roughly 220,000-person workforce.
