Hacker publishes data for 9000 Homeland Security employees

A hacker allegedly published the data of 9,000 employees of the US Department of Homeland Security, including names, positions, email addresses and phone numbers. The details of 20,000 FBI employees would soon follow.

The hacker would have initially contacted Motherboard and shared some information, the site claims. Editors would then have called random numbers from the database and were able to confirm that some of the data was from Homeland Security and FBI employees.

Shortly after the Motherboard article appeared, the hacker actually published the data of 9,000 employees with a link on Twitter with a pro-Palestinian message. He also announced today that he will be publishing the data of 20,000 FBI employees, several of whom reside abroad. He would also be in possession of more than a hundred GB of data from a computer of the Ministry of Justice.

The hacker told Motherboard that he first gained access to the email of a law enforcement officer. Then he tried to enter a ministry web portal. When this failed, he called a help desk and told him he couldn’t get into the portal. Then he would have received a token from an employee with which he could log in to an online virtual machine with the previously obtained e-mail data.

There he was presented with several options, including the ability to log into the work computer of the owner of the email data. Through this computer he had access to 1TB of data, of which he eventually downloaded 200GB. This incident is not the first this year where sensitive US government data was accessed. In January, a teenager managed to get hold of several accounts of the head of the US intelligence services.