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The digital extortion group \u200cknown as ShinyHunters says it has breached the Federal Bureau of Investigation and claims to have stolen data on thousands of FBI employees.<\/p>\n
Later, the FBI said in a statement that the agency “is aware\u00a0of claims regarding unauthorized activity affecting FBIjobs.gov\u00a0and is currently investigating.”<\/p>\n
ShinyHunters said in a statement posted to its dark-web site and during an \u200bonline chat with Reuters that it targeted \u2060the FBI in response \u2060to a May \u200c2026 agency announcement that detailed the group’s methods and advised targets not to pay. It said it\u00a0had stolen data “on almost ALL \u200bFBI agents, and individuals who\u00a0filed an application with the FBI for \u2060a job.”<\/p>\n
It shared what it said was a screenshot of a vandalized \u2060FBI job site and what\u00a0the group said was information\u00a0on \u2060roughly 5,000 agents. It said it was a sample of \u200cthe overall\u00a0stolen data set.<\/p>\n
Reuters could not verify the authenticity \u200cof the screenshot, but a message posted to the FBI job site on Tuesday said that the site and the FBI “Special Agent Applicant Portal” were \u200bboth “currently unavailable.”<\/p>\n
Data appeared to contain names and addresses<\/p>\n
The data sample appeared to contain information about FBI\u00a0agents’ names, home \u2060addresses, Social Security numbers, their assignments and, in at least some cases, the names of their family members.<\/p>\n
Reuters was able to partially verify the authenticity of some of \u2060the allegedly stolen FBI personnel information by running the \u2060names and postal address details against credit bureau records and \u2060previously \u2060breached data preserved \u200bby the dark-web intelligence firm District 4 Labs.<\/p>\n
In at least 10 instances\u00a0\u2014 including in the case of FBI\u00a0Director Kash Patel \u2014 Reuters found details that appeared to\u00a0match. A person familiar with the matter said that the job\u00a0descriptions in the data also matched in at least some cases. <\/p>\n
However, the news agency could not establish where the data came from, or whether it had been stolen from the FBI’s internal systems as the hackers claimed. Attempts to reach the people \u2060whose details were in the sample data were\u00a0unsuccessful.<\/p>\n
Cynthia Kaiser, a former FBI official, said breaches like\u00a0the one claimed by ShinyHunters were “incredibly harmful”\u00a0because they could \u2060be used by criminals to expose and put\u00a0pressure on the people investigating them.<\/p>\n
Kaiser, now senior vice-president at \u2060cybersecurity firm\u00a0Halcyon, \u2060noted that an old leak dating back \u200bto 2016 is still\u00a0occasionally used today to harass FBI agents. <\/p>\n
“Once that\u00a0information is stolen, it is used forever,” she said.<\/p>\n
Same group was behind Canvas hack<\/p>\n
ShinyHunters is one of the world’s \u2060most \u2060notorious and\u00a0attention-seeking hacking crews. <\/p>\n
Its recent \u200bbreak-ins include\u00a0the purported theft of millions of business records from video\u00a0game developer Rockstar Games, \u200bthe maker of Grand Theft \u2060Auto,\u00a0and a May intrusion centered on education tool Canvas that\u00a0caused widespread disruption across schools around the world, including several Canadian universities. Earlier this\u00a0month, AI company Anthropic said it had caught ShinyHunters-linked hackers trying to use its tools.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, the group told Reuters it had gone to war against\u00a0 another notorious cybercrime group, cl0p, \u2060in a rare bout \u200cof\u00a0public score-settling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 3 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":906018,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48],"class_list":["post-906017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=906017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/906018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=906017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=906017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=906017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}