san.com Aug 23, 2025 at 12:34 AM GMT+2
A hacker breached an airline and stole information on hundreds of thousands of people, including U.S. government employees.
Summary
Exposed IDs
Straight Arrow News examined 2,626 photos of identifying documents such as passports, IDs and birth certificates that were stolen by a hacker.
U.S. government data
The data includes the names, emails and phone numbers of employees from the State Deptartment, ICE, TSA, CBP and more.
Airline denial
Uzbekistan Airways denied that any intrusion took place and even suggested that leaked data may have been generated with artificial intelligence.
Full story
A hacker claims to have stolen information on hundreds of thousands of people — including U.S. government employees — after breaching an international airline. Straight Arrow News obtained a sample of the data, allegedly taken from Uzbekistan Airways, and confirmed the presence of sensitive documents such as scans of thousands of passports.
The data was advertised on Thursday by the hacker, who is known online as ByteToBreach and purports to be a native of the Swiss Alps, on a dark web forum known for hosting leaks, malware and hacking tools. The purportedly 300-gigabyte data cache contains, among other things, the email addresses of 500,000 passengers and 400 airline employees.
The post included a sample of the data, such as alleged credentials for multiple servers and software programs run by the airline. It also showed partial credit card data, as well as scans of 75 passports from the U.S., Russia, Israel, the U.K., South Korea and other nations. The hacker claims to have obtained identifying documents from more than 40 different countries.
The hacker provided Straight Arrow News with a larger data sample than the one posted online, containing 2,626 photos of identifying documents such as passports, IDs, marriage licenses and birth certificates. Numerous passports belonged to babies and young children.
Passports and other identifying data are valuable on underground markets given their potential use for a range of criminal activities, such as fraud and identity theft. Hackers could also leverage the prevalence of data on government employees for phishing attacks.
U.S. government employees’ data compromised
Another document from the sample the hacker provided to SAN contained 285 email addresses belonging to airline employees. A list of email addresses for passengers held 503,410 entries.
A spreadsheet with personal information of 379,603 members of Uzbekistan Airways’ loyalty program exposes names, genders, birthdates, nationalities, email addresses, phone numbers, member IDs and more.
The email addresses indicate that those members include employees of several U.S. government agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Energy, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and the Transportation Security Administration.
Employees of foreign government agencies from countries like Russia, Uzbekistan and the United Arab Emirates were also in the data.
SAN reached out to several phone numbers of government employees. An apparent TSA employee answered the phone by introducing themselves with the first name listed in the hacked data, as well as their government position. After SAN explained that their data had been exposed, the employee declined to comment and referred a reporter to the Department of Homeland Security’s public affairs office.
The public affairs office did not respond to an email from SAN. An email to the State Department’s office of press operations went unanswered as well.
Four files containing raw reservation and ticketing data mention airlines, airports, flight numbers and other information. The hacker also claimed that the raw data contained partial credit card information, although SAN was unable to independently verify the presence of financial data.
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politico.com - The identities of confidential court informants are feared compromised in a series of breaches across multiple U.S. states.
The electronic case filing system used by the federal judiciary has been breached in a sweeping cyber intrusion that is believed to have exposed sensitive court data across multiple U.S. states, according to two people with knowledge of the incident.
The hack, which has not been previously reported, is feared to have compromised the identities of confidential informants involved in criminal cases at multiple federal district courts, said the two people, both of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the hack.
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts — which manages the federal court filing system — first determined how serious the issue was around July 4, said the first person. But the office, along with the Justice Department and individual district courts around the country, is still trying to determine the full extent of the incident.
It is not immediately clear who is behind the hack, though nation-state-affiliated actors are widely suspected, the people said. Criminal organizations may also have been involved, they added.
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts declined to comment. Asked whether it is investigating the incident, the FBI referred POLITICO to the Justice Department. The Justice Department did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
It is not immediately clear how the hackers got in, but the incident is known to affect the judiciary’s federal core case management system, which includes two overlapping components: Case Management/Electronic Case Files, or CM/ECF, which legal professionals use to upload and manage case documents; and PACER, a system that gives the public limited access to the same data.
In addition to records on witnesses and defendants cooperating with law enforcement, the filing system includes other sensitive information potentially of interest to foreign hackers or criminals, such as sealed indictments detailing non-public information about alleged crimes, and arrests and search warrants that criminal suspects could use to evade capture.
Chief judges of the federal courts in the 8th Circuit — which includes Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota — were briefed on the hack at a judicial conference last week in Kansas City, said the two people. It is unclear who delivered the brief, though the Director of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Judge Robert J. Conrad, Jr., was in attendance, per the first person. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was also in attendance but didn’t address the breach in his remarks.
Staff for Conrad, a district judge in the Western District of North Carolina, declined to comment.
The hack is the latest sign that the federal court filing system is struggling to keep pace with a rising wave of cybersecurity threats.
The pro-Israeli hacktivist group Predatory Sparrow claimed on Tuesday to have hacked and taken down Iran’s Bank Sepah.
The group, which is also known by its Persian name Gonjeshke Darande, claimed responsibility for the hack on X.
“We, ‘Gonjeshke Darande,’ conducted cyberattacks which destroyed the data of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ ‘Bank Sepah,’” the group wrote.
The group claimed Bank Sepah is an institution that “circumvented international sanctions and used the people of Iran’s money to finance the regime’s terrorist proxies, its ballistic missile program and its military nuclear program.”
According to the independent news site Iran International, there are reports of “widespread banking disruptions” across the country. Iran International said several Bank Sepah branches were closed on Tuesday, and customers told the publication that they were unable to access their accounts.
Ariel Oseran, a correspondent for i24NEWS, posted pictures of ATMs in Iran displaying an error message.
TechCrunch could not independently verify the group’s alleged cyberattack. We reached out to two Bank Sepah Iranian email addresses, but the messages returned an error. Bank Sepah’s affiliates in the U.K. and Italy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Predatory Sparrow did not respond to a request for comment sent to their X account, and via Telegram.
The alleged cyberattack on Bank Sepah comes as Israel and Iran are bombing each other’s countries, a conflict that started after Israel began targeting nuclear energy facilities, military bases, and senior Iranian military officials on Friday.
It’s unclear who is behind Predatory Sparrow. The group clearly fashions itself as a pro-Israel or at least anti-Iran hacktivist group and has targeted companies and organizations in Iran for years. Cybersecurity researchers believe the group has had success in the past and made credible claims.
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