CIA Director John Brennan's private AOL email account was allegedly hacked, according to the New York Post, and now the FBI has confirmed it's investigating the claim.
"In a series of phone conversations with the Post, the hacker described himself as an American high school student who is not Muslim and was motivated by opposition to US foreign policy and support for Palestine,"
the Post reported on Sunday.
The next day, the same self-identified hacker explained how he allegedly broke into Brennan's email account.
First, the hacker and two accomplices said they did a reverse lookup of Brennan's mobile phone number, discovering that he was a Verizon customer. One of the hackers then posed as a Verizon technician on the phone, asking real employees for account information.
"After providing the Verizon employee with a fabricated employee Vcode — a unique code the he says Verizon assigns employees — they got the information they were seeking. This included Brennan’s account number, his four-digit PIN, the backup mobile number on the account, Brennan’s AOL email address and the last four digits on his bank card,"
reported Wired.
They also allegedly obtained Brennan's 47-page application for a security clearance, known as an SF86.
Then, on October 12, the hackers said they called AOL and claimed to be locked out of their account. By presenting all the info they obtained from Verizon, they were able to gain access to Brennan's email account.
The hackers claim that Brennan forwarded some email from his White House email account to his personal account.
"Among the attachments was a spreadsheet containing names and Social Security numbers — some of them for US intelligence officials — and a letter from the Senate asking the CIA to halt its use of harsh interrogation techniques — that is, its controversial use of torture tactics," wrote Wired. "These documents appear to come from 2009."
On Friday, the hackers reported via Twitter that Brennan had deleted the account after they notified him that they'd compromised it.
Fox News confirmed on Monday that the FBI is now looking into the alleged hacking incident.