U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Hacked, Exposing Data of 8.5 Million Users
The US Environmental Protection Agency EPA is facing a major security issue that is a result of a hacker’s cyberattack which he/she is in the USDoD phony persona.
This breach however has resulted in leaking of personal and sensitive information such as that of more than 8.5 million uses which include both customers and crew members.
Breach Unveiled by The Guardian Online
The Guardian Online caught wind of the issue on Sunday, April 7, 2024. To illustrate, USDoD experienced its largest data leak in the history of attacks, affected 87,000 InfraGard participants, a highly sensitive FBI-funded security community, established to secure critical infrastructure in the U.S.
The one who hacked the EPA claim the database was successfully tampered with and every document leaked.
At this juncture, it seems that Hack Read team has detected the leaked data provided by US Department of Defense as genuine, even though, the verified verification is with the Environmental Protection Agency.
Coming across this pirated leak online there is a 500MB Zip archive sitting in three CSV files labelled “Contact”, “Inter_Contact”, and “Staff”. Forensic examination of these files gives us a lot of information and data.
Contact File (3,726,130 Records)
Zipcodes
Full names
Fax numbers
Phone numbers
Email addresses
Mailing addresses
Country, city, States
Inter_Contact File (9,952,374 Records)
Zipcodes
Full names
Phone numbers
Email addresses
Email domains
Country, City, State
Company name and address
Staff File (3,325,973 Records)
Zipcodes
Fill names
Job titles
Company names
Email addresses
Business Addresses
Phone numbers
Related industries
Country, city and States
Implications of the Breach
Taken after all the duplicates are removed, the grand total number of accounts involved rises to approximately 8, 5 million, signified by 8,460,182.
To the upside is a nice feature that we don’t have to memorise passwords.
On top of this, the information leak could be spread among the members of the Russian hacker and the cybercrime community as well, which would exacerbate the situation.
Beyond that, such exposure drastically increases chances of state-sponsored cyber espionage and makes individuals more vulnerable to ID theft or phishing attacks.
Beyond that, we can barely overlook the fact that any environmental information disclosed may include facilities or persons reporting their environmental violations which gives critical issues to think about.
These releases may together discourage the reporters from being involved in this case and eventually hinder the EPA from successfully applying the regulation.