Hacktivist Group Leaks Contact and Program Details for 41,000 Homeland Security Personnel

A hacktivist group calling itself the Department of Peace has stolen and released records covering more than 41,000 Homeland Security personnel. The leaked records contain email addresses, phone numbers and office addresses of DHS staff, according to Engadget.

The data goes beyond contact details. The records include sensitive information about DHS undercover and surveillance programs, and they identify staff involved in human intelligence (HUMINT), the gathering of information through human sources, as Reuters reported. Wired also reported that the material includes the locations of ICE and CBP facilities.

By agency, 21,000 of the records identify people working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Another 10,000 belong to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel, and a third of the ICE records relate to Homeland Security Investigations, the unit that runs much of the agency's investigative work.

The hackers passed the data to Distributed Denial of Secrets, the transparency collective, and to the researcher maia arson crimew. The researcher built a searchable online database from the records, which Distributed Denial of Secrets is calling "Icepick." Once a dataset is searchable, a single name, phone number or street address returns a person's workplace and role. Think of the difference between a paper phone book and one with a search box. The second is a materially different exposure from a static file that must be parsed by hand.

A Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency is aware of a potential breach and is working to address it. BBC reported on the leak as details of thousands of U.S. immigration agents, and the Washington Post and NPR also covered it.

This is not the first time names of immigration agents have circulated online. In January, a site called ICE List alleged that a DHS whistleblower had leaked the identities of 4,500 agents. Police1 reported that the site's founder, who does not live in the United States, said the alleged leak included 2,000 frontline immigration enforcement officers. Those allegations were made by the founder and were not, as far as the reporting shows, tied to the October records. In July 2025, DHS said in a public statement that ICE officers faced a 700 percent increase in assaults as family members were doxed (had personal information published to enable harassment) and targeted.

The broader context here is operational. Staff rosters, facility locations and program details are useful to anyone trying to map an agency's footprint, and personal contact data makes it possible to reach officers at home.

In my view, the harder question for the agency is less about the breach itself than about how much personnel data is searchable from the outside to begin with. Directory exposure is a familiar problem in enterprise security, and the usual remedies apply: tighter access controls on staff directories, minimization of the attributes published (sharing only the fields that are truly needed), and monitoring for bulk exfiltration, the large-scale copying of data out of HR and identity systems.

What remains open is how the breach occurred, which systems were involved, and how the agency's remediation will be scoped. Those details will determine whether this is a contained exposure or a durable one.