IDENTITY CRISIS

Pentagon Pete Gets Humiliated in Dark Web Leak

The defense secretary’s personal information has been exposed for all to see.

The man responsible for defending America couldn’t keep his own personal information off the dark web.

Pete Hegseth, 46, has had his driver’s license caught up in a massive identity theft scheme that has put millions of driver’s licenses belonging to U.S. and Canadian citizens on the dark web.

The FBI’s New Orleans field office has opened an investigation into the massive breach after security journalist Brian Krebs reported that an identity theft service launched on the dark web this week was selling digital scans of more than 153 million driver’s licenses. The trove also includes passports, medical cards and marijuana dispensary cards, among other forms of identification. A Defense Department spokesperson told the Daily Beast that Hegseth is aware of the allegations, but offered no further comment.

The secretary of defense wasn’t the only Trump official caught in the privacy breach. Krebs wrote that, during the course of his research, he found that the service was also selling the driver’s license information of an FBI assistant director. He did not identify the official. Krebs said several other high-profile government officials were also included in the leak, but did not specify who.

“Word got around to the FBI that I was poking at the apparent source of this new identity theft service’s data. Probably they were tipped off when I shared with a trusted source that Nexus also is selling the drivers license information for the assistant director of the FBI (I did not find FBI Director Kash Patel’s license in Nexus),” he wrote.

Nexus, the identity theft service, disappeared from the dark web shortly after Krebs published his story.

An FBI spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast. In a statement to Nexstar, a New Orleans spokesperson said, “The FBI can confirm that it is looking into the incident. Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, we decline to comment further.”

Seemant Sehgal, founder and CEO of BreachLock, told Infosecurity Magazine that the breach of millions of North Americans’ personal information means they will “carry this exposure for life.”

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“A license contains the owner’s date of birth, address, physical descriptors, and a government-issued ID number. This is enough data to pass identity verification checks that most financial institutions and government agencies still treat as reliable,” he told the outlet.

In some cases, Krebs said the timestamps on the identification scans corresponded with dates when he or others rented cars from Hertz or, in other cases, purchased marijuana from dispensaries.

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Laura EspositoBreaking News Reporter

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