US government says it got hacked — again

The Department of Homeland Security is said to be investigating a breach of its platform, which federal, state, and local governments and law enforcement use to share intelligence, with one senior lawmaker warning that the information spill could risk national security.

News sites Nextgov, which first reported the incident, and Bleeping Computer report that DHS officials are probing a cyberattack on 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.

The hackers reportedly broke into HSIN servers during late May and early June, potentially exposing information shared using the platform, per Nextgov.

Bleeping Computer quoted a DHS spokesperson as saying that the department is “aware of a recent cyber incident involving a specific, unclassified legacy information sharing environment.”

It’s unclear what data was stolen or how much was taken, and a spokesperson for Homeland Security did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment about the incident. A previously reported security lapse during 2023 revealed that HSIN contained personal information shared among law enforcement related to the surveillance of Americans.

The incident involving HSIN puts fresh scrutiny on the government’s ability to defend the cybersecurity of its own systems, following over a year of deep cuts across the federal government, including Homeland Security and its cybersecurity agency CISA, under the Trump administration.

While the intelligence shared over HSIN is unclassified, the information “is highly sensitive, and its exposure risks national security,” said Mark Warner, a Democratic senator representing Virginia who also serves as the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a statement. 

Warner said that the HSIN platform is supporting the World Cup games 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., which killed 67 people.

The identity, affiliation, and motives of the hackers who targeted HSIN are not known, but the breach marks the latest security lapse to affect the federal government over the past year. 

Since the Trump administration took office in January 2025, the federal government has been beset by several major cybersecurity breaches, including the sharing of classified information and war plans over apps like Signal that haven’t been cleared for government use, the raiding of federal databases of Americans’ personal information by members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and a reported public spill of reams of passwords and credentials by a CISA contractor that exposed access to government cloud systems.

Earlier this year, the FBI notified lawmakers in Congress that it had to declare a “major cyber incident” after exposing the phone numbers of targets under surveillance 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, reach out via Signal username zackwhittaker.1337 or by email: zack.whittaker@techcrunch.com.