[Hackers Claim to Have Leaked Information on Over 40,000 DHS Employees Through Okta; DDoSecrets Releases Data] BlockBeats reported on October 29th, citing TechCrunch, that a hacker calling himself "Department of Peace" claimed to have obtained a large amount of employee data from the Okta single sign-on system used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This data was publicly released on Wednesday by the data transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) as the "Icepick" dataset. The leaked records exceed 40,000, representing approximately one-fifth of DHS's roughly 220,000 employees. The data includes names, job titles, work emails, phone numbers, and office locations, along with information related to internal system permissions. Approximately 21,000 records pertain to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel, about 10,000 to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and nearly 1,000 records relate to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). TechCrunch claims to have verified the authenticity of some of the data, with timestamps indicating the data was exported around mid-August. The hackers also provided the data to journalist and hacker Maia Arson Crimew, who then passed it on to DDoSecrets. Okta responded that its systems and data were not compromised; a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security has not yet responded to requests for comment. The report indicates this is the third high-profile U.S. government data breach in the past month, following previous thefts of FBI personnel files and Pentagon personnel data.