Details of Thousands of US Immigration Agents Leaked in Major Hack

Details of more than 41,000 personnel working for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including thousands involved in immigration enforcement, have been leaked to the public.

The leak includes names, work addresses and phone numbers of DHS staff, including agents working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection, along with descriptions of the work they do for each agency.

Wednesday’s leak marks the third time in recent weeks that a government agency has been targeted by leaks or hacks.

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The seemingly unprecedented breach of employee information was made public online. A group called the Department of Peace accessed the information from DHS, while journalist and cybersecurity researcher maia crimew alongside the website Distributed Denial of Secrets put it online.

The information was put in a database named Icepick.

Most of the agents included, more than 21,000 of them, work for CBP, according to the data. Nearly 6,600 work for ICE.

Other records show agents with Homeland Security Investigations, the Federal Protective Service and even people working for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The leaked information also included dozens of previously unknown operation names, the agents that led and worked on those operations, and some of the technology they used in their work, including tech provided by Cellbrite and Palantir.

The groups wrote in an online statement that the leak was not meant to be a directory of every DHS agent. Rather the aim was to replace “anonymity with accountability”, according to Emma Best, a co founder of DDoSecrets.

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Last month, the FBI was hacked by a group called ShinyHunters, which took personal information about thousands of agents.

In recent days, the Federal Election Commission, which makes public political campaign donation data, was taken offline because of a suspected hacking attempt.

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