Hackers have grabbed and published the names and email addresses of thousands of high-ranking security officials, handing them over to an anti-secrecy website, reports NBC News. About 3,000 names belonging to the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a nonprofit organization for members of the intelligence community, were posted to Cryptome.org—including 95 members of the National Security Agency, and key figures from the White House, FBI, Pentagon, and CIA. "I guess I feel like anybody else this happens to—like I was violated," said the INSA president.
The move comes less than a week after INSA published a paper calling on better security for the nation's cyberdefenses. "We would love to name every spy that lives on Earth," says the architect who runs Cryptome, who says the data dump arrived via an unknown source. With so many names on the list, there is speculation that its publication might violate the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, although many at Cryptome mocked such allegations. "Those protected as covert spies do not join public organizations under their true identity," said one Cryptome posting. (More Cryptome stories.)