Hacker Leaks Data of 40,000+ Homeland Security Employees Including ICE Agents

A hacker going by the name “Department of Peace” has published personal data belonging to more than 40,000 U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees, exposing ICE agents, cybersecurity staff and senior officials to potential harassment and violence.

TechCrunch reports that the breach happened earlier this year and has not previously been disclosed. The leaked records include names, job titles, work emails, cell phone numbers and office locations for employees across the department, according to data reviewed by TechCrunch, which verified part of the dataset by checking names of known DHS employees against an offline copy of the database.

The hacker claims to have pulled the data from an Okta single sign-on system that DHS employees and contractors use to reach the department’s central network. That system reportedly also stores IT and login records showing which internal apps and systems each employee can access. Timestamps in the data suggest it was taken around mid-August.

Roughly 21,000 of the leaked records, more than half the total, belong to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employees who work at airports and ports of entry. About 10,000 relate to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its Homeland Security Investigations unit. Just under 1,000 cover staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and thousands more belong to DHS headquarters staff and other component agencies, including U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Federal Protective Service. In total, the leak covers about a fifth of DHS’s roughly 220,000-person workforce.

In a note left alongside the data and seen by TechCrunch, the hacker wrote: “They have our information, so it’s only fair that we have theirs.”

This is the second breach tied to DHS this year. An earlier incident involved the theft of thousands of contracts between the department and private companies, including defense contractors and surveillance vendors. It follows other recent breaches across the federal government, including the theft of personnel records belonging to thousands of FBI agents and the exposure of personal information for millions of current and former military personnel taken from the Pentagon’s human resources unit.

A DHS spokesperson, responding after the data was published, said: “DHS is aware of a potential breach and is actively working to address the situation swiftly and effectively. We take all security threats against our employees and officers seriously and will work to ensure all are properly protected. We will update the public when more information is available.”

An Okta spokesperson said the company was aware of the report but disputed that its systems were the source of the leak. “Okta is secure, and we have no evidence our data or systems were compromised,” the spokesperson said. The hacker did not respond to a request for comment on how the breach occurred.

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