A cyberattack was carried out on Monday, when an unknown hacker managed to infiltrate the federal government gaining access of records containing around 9,000 of employees information at the Department of Homeland Security and 20,000 at F.B.I in less than 24 hours.
The information that was obtained by the hacker appeared when an internal government directory was breached, allowing the cybercriminal to access employees email addresses, phone numbers and job titles.
According to a technology news site, Motherboard reports on early Sunday that the hacker claimed to have committed the cyberattacks as a promise to dump online a list of employees at Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security.
The hacker that gave out the information on Sunday and Monday, also advocated the support for pro-Palestinian groups, and made it a duty to release the information publicly as an attempt to embarrass the federal agencies.
While examining the breach, Peter Carr a spokesman for the Justice Department said, "There is no indication at this time that there is any breach of personally identifiable information," Marsha Catron a spokeswoman for Homeland Security confirms the statement.
Speculation leaves both agencies unsure if the breach was in any way connected to last fall's intrusion, when Homeland Security secretary's Jeh Johnson's private email account was exposed, along with C.I.A director John O. Brennan. Reports also suggest, the hackers that carried out the similar cyberattacks acted on behalf of the Palestinians.
Apparently the new breach didn't result from an outside computer used to hack in the system. Rather, officials claims that the intruder pretended to be a government employee to gain easy access into other parts of the system.
The officials couldn't clarify on how the attack had been executed, but they narrowed it as a social engineering breach, by means of digging out private information from social media, and using it to find out a user's password.
