Hackers Leak Identifying Info Of 41,000 DHS Employees 

Well, it appears that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is learning that if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. After spending the last year concealing basic identifying information of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, DHS has been subject to a massive leak exposing the information of 41,000 employees, including some undercover ICE agents. 

Wired reports that the hacktivist group Department of Peace has claimed credit for the leak. “On July 17th, Markwayne Mullin said he was ‘turning up the heat.’ This is what happens to ICE when you do that,” a spokesperson for the hacktivist group said in an online statement. “They have our information, so it’s only fair that we have theirs.”

This is so Persona 5 coded and I’m here for it, y’all. 

According to NPR, several groups and journalists coordinated the leak and publication of the information. The Department of Peace said it sent the information to the group Distributed Denial of Secrets, who posted it online through a database it calls Icepick. The Department of Peace also shared the data with U.S.-based journalist Ryan Ottignon, and a Swiss activist known as maia arson crimew. Ottignon and crime worked to shape the data into a searchable online database. 

The hackers say they obtained the information by subverting DHS’s single sign-on system, Okta. It’s kind of crazy that I use two-factor authentication to log into my Discord account, but the Department of Homeland Security opted into a single sign-on system for convenience. 

DHS released a statement addressing the leak, saying it was “aware of a potential breach and is actively working to address the situation swiftly and effectively.” The department added that it is taking necessary steps to “ensure all are properly protected.”

More than 21,000 records identify employees with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, with another 10,000 identifying Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees and its Homeland Security Investigations unit. While this is a massive and unprecedented breach, it only represents a fraction of Homeland Security’s over 220,000 employees. 

From Wired: 

According to a WIRED analysis of the data, CBP staffers account for more than half of the records. ICE accounts for about 10,000, roughly a third of them in Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative wing. Another 6,200 belong to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and nearly 1,000 are tied to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, more than half of them contractors. Altogether, the files cover about a seventh of DHS’s workforce, revealing how DHS is structured, from senior leadership down to individual immigration agents and detention contractors.

Like most large organizations, DHS uses permission groups to control access to internal systems, according to the leaked records. Nearly everyone named in the leak has access to at least some of these systems. At HSI, 39 employees across more than a dozen field offices belong to groups whose names include “CUC,” which government court filings say stands for “certified undercover operation.” Another group, apparently based in HSI’s St. Paul, Minnesota, area of operations, references “Keyhole,” which federal court filings describe as a certified undercover operation that recently funded HSI’s undercover surveillance of Minneapolis protest groups earlier this year.

“If authentic and current, this is an extraordinarily valuable intelligence resource for those seeking to penetrate DHS,” Alexander Leslie, a national security expert at the threat intelligence company Recorded Future, told Wired. “This dataset becomes way more valuable when correlated with previously compromised information, commercial data, and other intelligence collections. An adversary could spend months exploiting these relationships to identify vulnerable personnel, develop convincing impersonation attempts, or compromise ongoing investigations.”

There’s been something satisfying about seeing the Trump administration fall victim to its own hubris. The administration seems to be operating under the belief that since they have power, they can move with impunity. They can do whatever they want, and we just have to take it. Yet, whether it’s the courts or groups like the Department of Peace taking power into their own hands, the Trump administration’s janky attempts to enact its authoritarian vision keep falling flat.

Had DHS simply operated how it’s operated under literally every other presidency, they probably wouldn’t be in this situation. Now, not only has [insert group] exposed the information they were desperately trying to hide, but they also have DHS looking dumb and ineffectual. They are the Department of Homeland Security; security is literally in their name, and they couldn’t even keep their own data secure. 

How is anyone supposed to take DHS seriously anymore? 

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