Hackers Leak Personal Records of 41,000 DHS Employees

The attacker leveraged a vulnerability in Okta, the identity management service utilized by the department, to siphon the internal information. Among the affected records, 21,000 belong to Customs and Border Protection staff, while nearly 7,000 are associated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The dataset also implicates employees from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Homeland Security Investigations.

Beyond personal contact details, the leak reveals the specific surveillance technologies wielded by these agencies, including the Mobile Fortify facial recognition application and the data-analysis tool PenLink. The perpetrator, who justified the act as a retaliatory measure regarding the agencies' own tracking activities, provided the files to researcher maia arson crimew. The information is currently hosted by the nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets. This incident follows a recent similar breach targeting FBI personnel, underscoring a mounting vulnerability in federal agency data security.