Hacker group leaks info on 20,000 FBI employees

A hacker group calling itself DotGovs, yesterday tweeted a link to what it claimed was a directory of over 20,000 FBI employees. The data, encrypted with the password "lol," included names, job titles, phone numbers, states, and email addresses for 22,175 people.

The leak comes only 24 hours after the same group posted a link to what it called the directory of 9,372 Department of Homeland Security employees.

The FBI list, arranged alphabetically by the last name, included around 1,300 intelligence analysts and nearly 1,800 special agents. The DHS list contained names from A to Z and listed around 100 intelligence analysts.

The list could help those looking to launch future attacks, and also mean that DoJ employees answering the phone to someone who knew their name could no longer be confident that the caller was necessarily a well-informed insider. Hackers could also seek out "soft targets" in the list like administrators who might have received less rigourous training in  dealing with intelligence threats.

According to The Guardian, "an official likened it to stealing a years-old AT&T phone book after the telecom had already digitised most of its data."

The hackers boasted on Twitter, "FBI and DHS info is dropped and that's all we came to do, so now its time to go, bye folks! #FreePalestine."

After they published the data on the DHS employees yesterday, they tweeted, "Well folks, it looks like @TheJusticeDept has finally realized their computer has been breached after 1 week."

The hack is being investigated by the justice department.

Department spokesman Peter Carr told CNN, "The department is looking into the unauthorized access of a system operated by one of its components containing employee contact information," said Carr.

"This unauthorized access is still under investigation; however, there is no indication at this time that there is any breach of sensitive personally identifiable information. The department takes this very seriously and is continuing to deploy protection and defensive measures to safeguard information. Any activity that is determined to be criminal in nature will be referred to law enforcement for investigation."