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The headline refers to a February 9, 2016 report—not a newly established incident. SecurityWeek reported that records listing contact details and job titles for roughly 9,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and more than 20,000 FBI employees had been published. DOJ said the unauthorized access was under investigation and that, at that time, there was no indication sensitive personally identifiable information had been breached. The report does not establish the investigation’s eventual outcome.
What information was reported leaked?
SecurityWeek described records containing employee names, email addresses, phone numbers, and job titles. Its February 2016 account characterized the combined release as involving nearly 30,000 employee records: roughly 9,000 associated with DHS, followed by a document containing information on more than 20,000 FBI employees. Those are figures reported by SecurityWeek, not an independently verified government count.
SecurityWeek said Motherboard contacted some people whose details appeared in the release and confirmed that at least some of the information was accurate. That limited check did not validate every record in the dataset.
What did DOJ say about sensitive information?
SecurityWeek quoted DOJ spokesperson Peter Carr on February 9, 2016: “The department is looking into the unauthorized access of a system operated by one of its components containing employee contact information. 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.”
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Carr also said: “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.” These were contemporaneous remarks reported by SecurityWeek, not a statement about the investigation’s eventual result.
Which parts of the story were claims by the attackers?
The hackers reportedly claimed they obtained the employee details after compromising a DOJ employee’s email account and that the database was hosted on a DOJ intranet. They also claimed access to 1 TB of data and said they had downloaded 200 GB. SecurityWeek’s account did not independently establish these claims.
The attackers also made claims about military emails and payment-card data, but SecurityWeek reported that they offered no proof for those claims. The report does not confirm exposure of passwords, payment-card information, classified information, or other sensitive personal data.
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What is known about the investigation’s outcome?
The cited report establishes that DOJ said in February 2016 that the unauthorized access was under investigation and that there was then no indication of a breach of sensitive personally identifiable information. It does not document what investigators ultimately concluded. It therefore cannot establish either that the case remains open or that it was closed.
SecurityWeek’s February 9, 2016 report is the source for the incident details and the quoted DOJ response.
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