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Hacker stole personnel data about thousands of Homeland Security employees, including CBP and ICE agents

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Hacker stole personnel data about thousands of Homeland Security employees, including CBP and ICE agents

Personally identifiable information belonging to thousands of U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees has been published online after a hacker stole reams of data in a previously undisclosed breach at the government department earlier this year.

The breach includes names, job titles, and work contact information, such as email addresses, cell phone numbers, and office locations, of more than 40,000 people who work for the federal department, including border and immigration agents, cybersecurity staffers, and senior department officials.

A hacker who goes by the handle Department of Peace claimed they obtained the data from an Okta single sign-on system used by Homeland Security to allow employees and contractors across its various agencies to log in to its central network. The Okta system also contains IT and log-in records associated with the employees’ user account, including details about which systems and internal apps they are permitted to access.

More than half of the dataset — some 21,000 records — relate to employees with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), who work at airports and other ports of entry. 

The data also contains records associated with another 10,000 employees of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit, and just under a 1,000 employees who work at U.S. cybersecurity defense agency CISA. 

Thousands of additional records relate to staff who work at the department’s headquarters and its other agencies, including U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Federal Protective Service.

“They have our information, so it’s only fair that we have theirs,” said Department of Peace in a note left with the data, which TechCrunch has seen.


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