Hackers release huge list of FBI employees

Hackers have leaked 22,175 FBI employees’ names, job titles and contact details.

Wed, 10 Feb, 2016 - 00:00

Mark Hosenball

The US Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department are investigating after the personal data related to thousands of DHS and FBI employees was hacked.

The tech website Motherboard reported on Sunday that a hacker, who Motherboard said wished to remain anonymous, intended to dump onto the internet names, job titles, email addresses, and official phone numbers of more than 9,000 DHS employees, and another 20,000 Federal Bureau of Investigation workers.

Then, late on Monday, the FBI details appeared online on an encrypted text-sharing website.

The details were posted under the message, “Long Live Palestine, Long Live Gaza” and “#FreePalestine”.

The Site Intelligence Group, which monitors militant media activity, said a pro-Palestinian Twitter account on Sunday had posted a link to a document that contained 9,372 purported DHS employees’ data.

The posted data included DHS employees’ names, official titles, departments, phone and fax numbers, state and country address information, and official DHS.gov email address, Site said.

Site said the hack bore a strong resemblance to earlier breaches attributed to a group called Crackas with Attitude, which had been credited with attacks targeting CIA director John Brennan, FBI deputy director Mark Giuliano, and the Miami police.

However, a government official said some data published by the hacker relates to people who stopped working for DHS more than a year ago.

However, the FBI database of staff appears to contain every employee up to surnames beginning “Je” in the alphabet, more than half of the 35,000 people that work for the agency.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said: “The department is looking into the unauthorised access of a system operated by one of its components containing employee contact information.”

Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported that one of the hackers who claimed to be behind the latest breaches is a British man and former member of a hacker group called Lizard Squad, which claimed responsibilities for hacking popular gaming systems in late 2014.