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, in what reporters who examined the data described as a seemingly unprecedented breach of employee information.
Source: BBC News
The leak was put online on Wednesday by a group called the Department of Peace alongside cybersecurity researcher and hacker maia crimew. The information was placed in a database named Icepick and shared through a website hosted by Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets).
Source: BBC News
The leaked records include names, work addresses and phone numbers of DHS staff, including agents working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), along with descriptions of the work they do for each agency. According to the published data reported by the BBC, more than 21,000 of those included work for CBP and nearly 6,600 work for ICE, with other records covering Homeland Security Investigations, the Federal Protective Service and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Source: BBC News
Undercover operations and surveillance tools named
The data also included dozens of previously unknown operation names, the agents who led and worked on those operations, and some of the technology used in their work, including tools provided by Cellebrite and Palantir, the BBC reported. A separate analysis reported by Wired, via published summaries of its reporting, put the ICE figure at about 10,000 records and counted about 6,200 records for US Citizenship and Immigration Services and nearly 1,000 linked to the cybersecurity agency — the component-by-component counts differ between analyses of the same dataset, while the total of more than 41,000 records is consistent across reports.
Source: Wired via Zubiqo
TechCrunch and Wired both saw the data before publication, and TechCrunch matched the names of several known DHS employees against an offline copy of the database, according to an analysis of the leak's verification. That is partial verification of the dataset, not confirmation of every record in it.
Source: Steve Snyder / Substack analysis
What the leakers say — and what officials have not confirmed
The groups wrote in an online statement that the leak was not meant to be a directory of every DHS agent, and that its aim was to replace “anonymity with accountability”, according to Emma Best, a co-founder of DDoSecrets, as reported by the BBC and the Associated Press. Best called the leak “extraordinary”, saying it identifies officials responsible for overseeing covert and undercover operations and deportation programmes. These are the leakers' stated motives, presented here as their claims.
Source: Associated Press via RoboDaily
The Department of Peace said it accessed the DHS profiles through a single sign-on service called Okta, according to the reports. An Okta spokesperson said the company has no evidence its data or systems were compromised. A representative of the DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the department had not publicly confirmed the breach or its source at the time of these reports.
Source: Wired via Zubiqo
Wednesday's leak marks the third time in recent weeks that a US government agency has been targeted by leaks or hacks, according to the BBC. DHS and ICE have been at the centre of the immigration crackdown ordered by President Donald Trump at the start of his second term, and the exposure of agent identities and operation names is expected to raise security concerns for personnel involved in enforcement work.
Source: BBC News