Massive breach exposes US Federal Bureau of Prisons, hacker claims

Hundreds of gigabytes of data, allegedly stolen from the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), include extremely sensitive details about inmates and employees alike. Attackers claim they have data on release plans, security points, and personal information. BOP said it's investigating the alleged hack.

Attackers announced the leak via a post on a popular data leak forum. The data allegedly comes from a BOP server and includes multiple databases, totaling over 320GB of information. The attackers claim that the information is very fresh, taken as recently as June 20th.

BOP is a US law enforcement agency responsible for all of America’s federal prisons. The agency employs over 35,000 staff and has around 160,000 inmates in 120 facilities.

The agency told Cybernews it's aware of the attacker claims and is looking into the issue.

“We're aware of the claims and are investigating their legitimacy,” BOP's representative told Cybernews.

At the time of writing, it’s unclear how many individuals may have been exposed in the breach.

The attackers claim that the allegedly stolen database includes numerous details, revealing:

• Full names
• Registration numbers
• Social Security numbers (SSNs)
• Genders
• Races
• Medical details
• Risk Factors
• Prisons
• Incident reports
• Release plans
• Statements
• Other details

If confirmed, the leak could be extremely dangerous for both inmates and staff. Whoever gets their hands on the full dataset could exploit the details for identity theft and fraud. Moreover, inmates could be targeted by criminals and individuals looking to settle old scores.

Meanwhile, if staff details were leaked, malicious actors could sell personal identifiers to parties looking to retaliate against BOP employees. Leaks of details involving addresses and locations of prison staff could prove particularly dangerous.

Updated on June 27th [03:05 p.m. GMT] with a statement from BOP.