A hacker has recently accessed the employee records of the US Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Information on thousands of employees of the two government agencies were opened illegally. However, officials of the two departments said no sensitive information were included in the stolen data.
A majority of the illegally gotten data have been collected from government directories that include employees' phone numbers, job titles and email addresses.
A report from Motherboard revealed that it had been contacted by an anonymous hacker who boasted that he was able to obtain employee information on approximately 20,000 people at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and 9,000 at the Homeland Security department.
But US officials immediately downplayed the impact of the hacking. They claimed that the stolen data paled in comparison to the data robbed from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
"The department is looking into the unauthorized access of a system operated by one of its components containing employee contact information," said, Peter Carr, DOJ spokesman Peter Carr to the Guardian.
"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," he continued.
"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," he concluded.
The hacker said that he is supporting pro-Palestinian groups and warned that he will expose the information to the public in his attempt to put the two federal agencies in an embarrassing position.
These two agencies are tasked with implementing cyber security measures in the US government. This attack is the hacker's way of proving that these measures cannot stop people like him in accessing secure government data.
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