A leak exposed 40,000-plus DHS workers' names and phone numbers, including undercover agents
The records cover about one in five Homeland Security employees, from Border Patrol and ICE to cybersecurity staff.
A leak site posted the names, work emails, phone numbers and job assignments of more than 40,000 Department of Homeland Security employees on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Distributed Denial of Secrets, a nonprofit that publishes leaked data, released the records. Job titles and email groups in the data show which staff work in undercover operations, surveillance and computer forensics.
Who's in it
The records cover about one in five of DHS's roughly 220,000 workers, TechCrunch reported. By its count, about 21,000 work at Customs and Border Protection, about 10,000 at ICE and its Homeland Security Investigations unit, just under 1,000 at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and thousands more at headquarters, USCIS and the Federal Protective Service. Neither outlet reported home addresses or Social Security numbers in the data.
Reuters said it could not verify the whole dataset. It matched six named employees to credit bureau and breach records, and three employees it called confirmed their phone numbers and other details. One said it was the first they had heard of a breach. TechCrunch said the data "appears authentic."
How it got out
A hacker group calling itself the "Department of Peace" claimed it took the data from DHS's Okta single sign-on system, the service employees use to log in. TechCrunch reported the records appear to have been taken around mid-August. Okta disputed that: "Okta is secure, and we have no evidence our data or systems were compromised," the company said. A note left with the data said DHS employees "have our information, so it's only fair that we have theirs."
Emma Best, co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets, said the release would "replace anonymity with accountability" for journalists, records requests and congressional oversight, according to Reuters.
DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Reuters or TechCrunch.
What we don't know yet
It's unclear how the hackers got in, whether DHS has closed the gap, and whether affected employees will be notified. Reuters called this the third major government data leak in a month, after a hacking group claimed in September to have stolen FBI employee data and the Defense Department was sued last week over a breach of military personnel records.
It also lands a week after a federal judge ruled the Office of Personnel Management illegally gave DOGE access to federal workers' records.
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