US government claims it was hacked – again

The Department of Homeland Security is investigating a breach of its platform, which federal, state and local governments and law enforcement use to share intelligence, with a top lawmaker warning that leaking information could endanger national security.

News sites Nextgov, which first reported the incident, and Bleeping Computer report that DHS officials are investigating a cyberattack against its Homeland Security Information Network, or HSIN, which allows government agencies and local officials to plan, coordinate and share information and intelligence about major events and respond to emergencies.

Hackers reportedly broke into HSIN servers in late May and early June, potentially exposing information shared through the platform, according to Nextgov.

When contacted by email, an anonymous DHS spokesperson said the department was “aware of a recent cyber incident involving a specific, unclassified legacy information sharing environment.”

“We immediately took steps to isolate the affected systems, mitigate the vulnerability and launch a full forensic investigation,” the statement said. The investigation is ongoing and the spokesperson declined to comment further.

It’s unclear exactly what data was stolen or how much was taken, and Homeland Security did not respond to TechCrunch’s questions about the incident. A previously reported security breach in 2023 revealed that HSIN contained personal information shared between law enforcement related to surveillance of Americans.

The incident involving HSIN calls into question the government’s ability to defend the cybersecurity of its own systems, after more than a year of deep budget cuts across the federal government, including Homeland Security and its cybersecurity agency CISA, under the Trump administration.

Although the intelligence shared on HSIN is not classified, the information “is highly sensitive and its disclosure risks national security,” Mark Warner, a Democratic senator representing Virginia who is also the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.

Warner said the HSIN platform supports the World Cup matches currently underway in the United States and was also used last year to manage the response to the mid-air collision of an American Airlines jetliner and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter over Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people.

The identity, affiliation and motivations of the hackers who targeted HSIN are not known, but the breach marks the latest security breach affecting the federal government in the past year.

Since the Trump administration took office in January 2025, the federal government has been plagued by several major cybersecurity breaches, including the sharing of classified information and war plans on apps like Signal that have not been authorized for use by the government, the raid of federal databases of Americans’ personal information by members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and a public leak of tons of passwords and logins by a CISA contractor that exposed access to government cloud systems.

Earlier this year, the FBI informed lawmakers in Congress that it needed to declare a “major cyber incident” after revealing the phone numbers of targets monitored by federal agents, potentially giving those adversaries a potential advantage.

Do you know more about the DHS HSIN cyberattack? We would love to hear from you. To contact Zack Whittaker securely, contact us via Signal username zackwhittaker.1337 or email: [email protected].

Updated with comments from Homeland Security.

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