Hacker shows his support for the Free Palestine movement

Feb 8, 2016 14:50 GMT  ·  By

An unknown hacker that goes on Twitter only by the username of DotGovs has released the details of 9,000 US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees, and also claims to have info on 20,000 FBI employees and an undisclosed number of US Department of Justice (DoJ) staffers.

The data was released yesterday, but not before the hacker provided an exclusive interview to Vice, detailing how he managed to breach the DHS' computer system.

This wasn't a case of a complex cyber-attack, but as the hacker explains, a simple spear-phishing campaign that allowed him to gain access to the email account of one single DHS employee.

The hacker was granted access to a DoJ employee without any identity checkup

The hacker used the access to this account to convince a DoJ support staffer to grant him access to one of their Web portals, which he did without any type of identity verification.

After getting access to the portal, DotGovs saw the portal held around 1TB of data, but that he stole only around 200GB of information.

The hacker said that he had in his possession the details for 9,000 DHS employees and 20,000 FBI staffers, which he shared with the Vice reporter, who later confirmed their validity.

After giving the interview yesterday, the hacker moved today to release the details belonging to the 9,000 DHS employees on Twitter. The DHS details contain employee names, their work titles, telephone and fax numbers, department, state, and email addresses.

The hacker also says that he has more sensitive information in his possession that contains credit card numbers and military emails.

A possible CWA connection

Soon after releasing the data dump, the hacker tweeted and showed his support for the Free Palestine movement. In late 2015 and early 2016, hackers from the CWA group, who also showed their support for Palestine, hacked CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano, US National Intelligence Director James Clapper, President Barack Obama’s Senior Advisor on science and technology John Holdren.

Additionally, they also hacked into the JABS database and released details for 2,400 US government officials and 80 Miami police officers.

Even if the hacker did not show any affiliation with the now-defunct CWA hacking group, it is worth mentioning that CWA also used similar social engineering tricks and announced their data dumps exclusively via Vice (Motherboard) as well, so all these incidents may be connected.

UPDATE: One day later, the hacker released information on 20,000 FBI employees, as he promised.  

Screenshots of one of the hacked government portals
Screenshots of one of the hacked government portals

Data dump details (4 Images)

Hacker gets his hands on data about FBI, DHS, and DOJ employees
Screenshots of one of the hacked government portalsDHS employees data dump
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