Hackers claim to have leaked information of over 40,000 employees from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through Okta, and DDoSecrets has made it public
According to TechCrunch, a hacker claiming to be from the "Department of Peace" has reportedly obtained a large amount of employee data from the Okta single sign-on system used by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which was publicly released on Wednesday by the data transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) as the "Icepick" dataset. The leaked records exceed 40,000, accounting for about one-fifth of DHS's approximately 220,000 employees, involving names, positions, work emails, phone numbers, and office locations, along with information related to internal system permissions. Among these, approximately 21,000 records belong to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel, while about 10,000 records involve the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), with nearly 1,000 related to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).TechCrunch stated that it has verified the authenticity of some of the data, with timestamps indicating that the data was exported around mid-August. The hacker also provided the data to journalist and hacker maia arson crimew, who then forwarded it to DDoSecrets. Okta responded that its systems and data were not breached; a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security has not yet responded to requests for comment. The report indicates that this is the third incident of data leakage from the U.S. government that has drawn attention in the past month, following the theft of Federal Bureau of Investigation personnel files and Pentagon personnel data.
