UK Edition
Thousands of FBI and Homeland Security details stolen by hackers
Hackers have breached the US Department of Homeland Security's system and leaked personal details of the people who work there.
The hacker group - which we have chosen not to name - posted a database online that contained 9,355 names, titles, locations, telephone numbers and email addresses of the US government employees.
The details, seen by the Telegraph, were posted to an encrypted text-sharing website called Cryptobin. The group has warned that it has a further database, containing the details of 20,000 Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) employees, that it will release soon. It also claims to have access to 200GB of data from the Department of Justice, according to Motherboard.
The hackers claim that the leaked database contains the information of "all Homeland Security employees." In fact, the Department employs around 240,000 people. But the Telegraph can confirm that names on the list of 9,355 employees do correspond with people that work at the Department.
The employees listed include people in the communications team, security specialists, intelligence analysts, and many more. Some of the names are publicly available on databases online, including Linked In.
Ahead of the release, a hacker claiming to be behind the breach told Motherboard how he accessed the data - through a simple spear phishing email attack. He first got access to an internal Department of Justice network through an email account and a quick phone call to a member of staff there.
He found the database on the intranet, along with 1TB of data. He managed to download the details of about 30,000 US government employees from the FBI and Homeland Security, as well as 200GB of data. The data includes more sensitive information like credit card numbers and military emails, he said.
It is likely that the list of Homeland Security employees is just the first release that will come from the group, which describes itself as pro-Palestine. The Homeland Security data was posted under the message: "This is for Palestine, Ramallah, West Bank, Gaza, this is for the child that is searching for an answer."
The breach is the latest in a series of foreign policy-motivated attacks against US government employees. In October, a teenage hacker accessed the personal email account of John Brennan, the CIA director. They then posted online a list of email addresses apparently from his contacts list.
The same teen followed the hack with a prank that meant every call to James Clapper, the US Director of National Intelligence, was forwarded to the Free Palestine Movement.
WikiLeaks released a trove of documents from the hacked personal email of Brennan back in October.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, said it did not think the hackers had managed to release "sensitive, personally-identifiable information", and that if it discovered criminal activity it would press charges.
“The department is looking into the unauthorised access of a system operated by one of its components containing employee contact information," he told The Telegraph.
"This unauthorised access is still under investigation; however, there is no indication at this time that there is any breach of sensitive personally identifiable information.
"The department takes this very seriously and is continuing to deploy protection and defensive measures to safeguard information. Any activity that is determined to be criminal in nature will be referred to law enforcement for investigation.”
The Telegraph has contacted the FBI for comment and is awaiting response.
A spokesman from the Department of Homeland Security said it is "looking into the reports."
"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," they said.
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