A hacker claims to have gained access to the email addresses and phone numbers of thousands of FBI and Department of Homeland Security employees using a compromised Justice Department email account, Motherboard reported Sunday.
Joseph Cox writes that the hacker plans to release the obtained information on 20,000 FBI and 9,000 DHS personnel to the public.
An update to the report on Monday noted that a pro-Palestine account on Twitter has already published the details of the DHS employees.
“We are looking into the reports of purported disclosure of DHS employee contact information,” a DHS spokesman told Motherboard in an email.
“We take these reports very seriously; however, there is no indication at this time that there is any breach of sensitive or personally identifiable information.”
Cox reports that the hacker said he used the credentials of the compromised DOJ email account to log in to an online virtual machine, which provided him access to the user’s documents and others in the local network.
The hacker added that he downloaded 200 GB of data — including the job titles and contact information of the FBI and DHS workers — from a DOJ intranet, the report said.