From Decrypt · By Jose Antonio Lanz
In brief
Distributed Denial of Secrets published a dataset called Icepick on Oct. 28 with work details for 41,191 DHS employees and contractors, including 21,329 from Customs and Border Protection and about 10,000 from ICE.
A hacktivist group called the Department of Peace says it took the records from an Okta login service used by DHS, while Okta says it has no evidence its systems were compromised.
DHS says it is aware of a potential breach and has filed a takedown notice; a sample of named employees has been matched to other records but the full archive has not been verified.
Names, job titles, office locations, and phone numbers for more than 41,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and contractors were published online Wednesday by a transparency nonprofit.
The nonprofit says a hacktivist group, meaning hackers driven by politics rather than profit, gave it the records.
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The department oversees border protection, immigration enforcement, and cybersecurity, so the file works like a directory of who does what, who reports to whom and how to reach them.
Transparency groups say the contact details are useful for public-records requests. Security researchers warn the same list could help anyone who wants to impersonate a supervisor over the phone or work out who sits behind a sensitive investigation.
The nonprofit, Distributed Denial of Secrets, publishes leaked documents and calls this dataset Icepick. It says the hackers, who call themselves the Department of Peace, took the records from an Okta single sign-on service used by DHS, a login system that lets employees open many internal tools with one account.
Okta, the company behind that login service, disputes the claim. “Okta is secure, and we have no evidence our data or systems were compromised,” the company told Reuters.
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The searchable archive indexes 41,191 people, including 21,329 from Customs and Border Protection and about 10,000 from ICE, a third of them in its investigative arm, Homeland Security Investigations.