(JTA) — An anonymous pro-Palestinian hacker released the employee information of thousands of people who work at the U.S. Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security.
On Sunday and Monday, the hacker dumped data including employees’ email addresses, phone numbers and job titles. The data was released via a Twitter account; the Twitter message included the hash tag #FreePalestine.
Government officials told The New York Times that the information appeared to be culled from internal government directories.
On Sunday, the hacker first made his intentions known to the technology news website Motherboard, which received a copy of the encrypted list before it was publicly released. Motherboard called some of those phone numbers at random and reached the people who were listed or their voicemail boxes, as well as the operations center of the FBI.
Among the job titles on the list were contractors, biologists, special agents, task force officers, technicians, intelligence analysts and language specialists.
The hacker told Motherboard that he first compromised the account of a Department of Justice employee and eventually hacked into the department’s entire intranet.
In October, pro-Palestinian hackers hacked into the email account of CIA director John Brennan and hackers forwarded the calls of the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, to the Free Palestine Movement.
