By Raphael Satter and AJ Vicens
WASHINGTON, Sept 22 (Reuters) – The digital extortion group known as “ShinyHunters” said on Tuesday that it had breached the Federal Bureau of Investigation and stolen data on a huge number of current and former FBI employees.
Later, the FBI said in a statement that the agency “is aware of claims regarding unauthorized activity affecting FBIjobs.gov and is currently investigating.”
In a statement posted to its dark-web site and during an online chat with Reuters, ShinyHunters said it had targeted the FBI in response to a May 2026 agency announcement that detailed ShinyHunters’ methods and advised targets not to pay.
It said it had stolen data “on almost ALL FBI Agents, and individuals who filed an application with the FBI for a job.”
As proof, the group offered what it said was a screenshot of a vandalized FBI job site and what the group said was information on roughly 5,000 agents it said was a sample of the overall stolen data set.
JOB SITE DISRUPTION
Reuters could not verify the authenticity of the screenshot, but the job site did appear to have experienced recent disruption. A message posted to the site on Tuesday said that both it and the FBI “Special Agent Applicant Portal” were “currently unavailable.”
The data sample appeared to contain information about FBI agents’ names, home addresses, Social Security numbers, their assignments and, in at least some cases, the names of their family members.
Reuters was able to partially verify the authenticity of the information by running the details, including the Social Security numbers, against credit bureau records and previously breached data preserved by the dark-web intelligence firm District 4 Labs.
In at least 10 instances — including in the case of FBI Director Kash Patel — Reuters found details that appeared to match. A person familiar with the matter said that the job descriptions in the data also matched in at least some cases.
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 whose details were in the sample data were unsuccessful.
PAST THEFTS WERE HARMFUL
Cynthia Kaiser, a former FBI official, said breaches like the ones claimed by ShinyHunters were “incredibly harmful” because they could be used by criminals to expose and put pressure on the people investigating them.
Kaiser, now senior vice president at cybersecurity firm Halcyon, noted that an old leak dating back to 2016 was still occasionally used today to harass FBI agents. “Once that information is stolen, it is used forever,” she said.
ShinyHunters is one of the world’s most notorious and attention-seeking hacking crews.
Its recent break-ins include the purported theft of millions of business records from video game developer Rockstar Games, the maker of “Grand Theft Auto,” and a May intrusion centered on education tool Canvas that caused widespread disruption across US schools. Earlier this month, AI company Anthropic said it had caught ShinyHunters-linked hackers trying to use its tools.
On Sunday, the group told Reuters it had gone to war against another notorious cybercrime group, cl0p, in a rare bout of public score-settling.
(Reporting by Raphael Satter; Editing by Daniel Wallis, Jonathan Spicer and David Gregorio)
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