Police have arrested a 16-year-old teenager in relation to the recent DHS and FBI data hack.
Earlier this week, we reported that hackers leaked the information of more than 20,000 FBI employees and 9,000 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees.
Authorities have now made an arrest in the case, but it's not some well-known hacking collective or a terrorist group as some may have thought. Police have traced down the hack to a 16-year-old English teen, who allegedly breached the personal email accounts of the DHS chief and the CIA director as well.
Authorities have not disclosed the name of the teen hacker, but Fox News reports that British authorities made the arrest in collaboration with the FBI. Authorities are reportedly looking for potential accomplices.
The hacker allegedly told Motherboard recently that he obtained the titles, names and contact information of thousands of FBI and DHS employees by exploiting a compromised Department of Justice (DoJ) email.
According to Fox News, authorities suspect that the same hacker previously breached the private email accounts of CIA director John Brennan and Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson back in October. Neither Brennan nor Johnson used those email accounts for government use.
The 16-year-old teen now arrested in connection to the FBI and DHS hacks is suspected of leading a hacker group called "Crackas with Attitude," or "CWA" for short. The teen's online moniker was "Cracka," and his arrest followed days after another CWA member was questioned by police. Following the arrest, the suspect's friends and associates threatened that there will be repercussions, Motherboard reported.
"Just because they managed to arrest two members doesn't mean we'll stop hacking them," CWA hacker IncursioSubter told Motherboard. "Give us time, you'll see. :)"
Meanwhile, the FBI is still trying to wipe the leaked data off the web, albeit that's no easy task. The breached data containing the email addresses, job positions and phone numbers of thousands of DHS and FBI employees traveled all over the web, from pastebin-like sites to several other hosts such as San Francisco community news site Indybay.
The FBI wants to have that data removed, but efforts to wipe data off the face of the Internet often turn out to be futile.
