U.S. officials say there is "no indication" that a data breach led to Islamic State's posting on the Internet what it says are the names, addresses and photographs of 100 U.S. military personnel that it encouraged its supporters in the United States to kill.
A U.S. defense official told VOA "the safety of our service members is always a concern and we encourage our personnel to exercise appropriate force protection procedures." The official added that "services are conducting appropriate notifications in accordance with their service specific procedures," and said the Department of Defense takes all threats against service members seriously.
The official, when asked if the information posted by Islamic State could be found by searching the Internet, said "there's an awful lot out there through Facebook, through media reports, and when you link all of this together, information becomes very accessible."
A group calling itself the Islamic State Hacking Division said Sunday the details of the service members, who it claims were involved in U.S. airstrikes against IS in Iraq and Syria, came from government servers and databases.
However, defense officials say it does not appear the militants hacked the information from U.S. government websites and that most of it is publicly available.
