Over 40,000 U.S. DHS employee records allegedly leaked via Okta and published by DDoSecrets

Huo Xing Finance reports, according to TechCrunch, a hacker identifying as "Department of Peace" claimed to have obtained a large volume of employee data from the Okta single sign-on system used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with the data transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) publicly releasing it on Wednesday as the "Icepick" dataset. The leaked records exceed 40,000 entries, accounting for approximately one-fifth of DHS’s roughly 220,000 employees, and include names, job titles, work email addresses, phone numbers, office locations, and associated internal system permissions. Approximately 21,000 records pertain to personnel from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), around 10,000 relate to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division, and nearly 1,000 records are linked to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). TechCrunch stated it has verified the authenticity of some data; timestamps indicate the data was exported around mid-August. The hacker also provided the data to journalist and hacker maia arson crimew, who then passed it on to DDoSecrets. Okta responded that its systems and data were not compromised; a DHS spokesperson has not yet responded to requests for comment. The report notes that this is the third significant U.S. government data breach to attract attention in the past month, following prior thefts of FBI personnel files and Pentagon human resources data.