DoJ, DHS hacked; employee data exposed by “Free Palestine” hacktivists

posted at 2:01 pm on February 8, 2016 by Ed Morrissey

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A hacker, who wishes to remain anonymous, plans to dump the apparent names, job titles, email addresses and phone numbers of over 20,000 supposed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) employees, as well as over 9,000 alleged Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees, Motherboard has learned.
The hacker also claims to have downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of data from a Department of Justice (DOJ) computer, although that data has not been published.
On Sunday, Motherboard obtained the supposedly soon-to-be-leaked data and called a large selection of random numbers in both the DHS and FBI databases. Many of the calls went through to their respective voicemail boxes, and the names for their supposed owners matched with those in the database. At one point, Motherboard reached the operations center of the FBI, according to the person on the other end.
One alleged FBI intelligence analyst did pick up the phone, and identified herself as the same name as listed in the database. A DHS employee did the same, but did not feel comfortable confirming his job title, he said.

The hacker, who attached a note to the leaked cache that said “this is for Palestine, Ramallah, West Bank, Gaza, this is for the child that is searching for an answer”, claimed to have attained the information via a Department of Justice (DoJ) computer. It is suspected that hundreds of gigabytes of data was stolen in the hack. …
Meanwhile, a twitter account under the handle @DotGovs appears to be host to the hackers responsible for the breach. On the profile, which has stated publicly that it has multiple admins, the hackers threatened to expose a separate set of up to 20,000 credentials from the FBI – however this data has not yet been published.

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.”

An FBI source told Newsweek that some FBI employees were notified in May that their files had been accessed by hackers during the massive year-long breach of OPM’s database.
More than 36,000 people currently work for the FBI, and while it remains unclear how many of them were affected by the alleged hack, the cyber security breach by the unnamed hacker can have “mind-boggling” effects, according to the sources, because there can be several classified data [sic].