FBI tells employees to assume hackers have their personal data

The FBI told employees to assume hackers stole their personal information, according to an internal memo reported this week by Reuters. The bureau is working from the premise that data on every staff member may have been exposed after a claimed breach of FBIjobs.gov. ShinyHunters claims it holds data on almost all FBI agents and everyone who applied for an FBI job. The group puts the data at 2 to 3 terabytes, including names, phone numbers, home addresses and, in some cases, spouse details. ShinyHunters says the intrusion began Monday night. By Tuesday, Sept. 22, visitors saw a banner saying ShinyHunters had seized the site. The group says it entered through a previously unknown flaw in Oracle's PeopleSoft human resources software. The FBI has not confirmed that method of entry. ShinyHunters says an FBI advisory prompted its action. In the May 15 advisory, the FBI warned that ShinyHunters uses harassment, including threats to victims' relatives and, in some cases, false emergency calls that send armed police to a person's home. ShinyHunters denies the warning's claims and gave the FBI one week to retract it. FBI Cyber Division Chief Brett Leatherman posted a video on Sept. 29 pointing to a Dutch arrest on Sept. 15. Leatherman told the hackers, "we know how to find you," and urged them to contact the bureau first. ShinyHunters says the arrested man has no association with the group. ShinyHunters later called its ultimatum a marketing campaign and said it does not plan to publish the data. The one-week window has passed. The memo tells staff to expect virtual briefings and watch for suspicious texts or calls from unknown numbers. If the data is released, employees and their relatives could face threats, harm or identity theft. ShinyHunters surfaced in 2020 selling stolen databases and helped run BreachForums. Last year, the group claimed about 1.5 billion records from customers of Salesforce. Coinbase said bribed support agents leaked customer data last year, after which it faced a $20 million extortion demand. As of April, France had recorded 135 crypto-related physical attacks since 2023 and charged 88 suspects. In one case, attackers who beat a couple outside their Nancy apartment reportedly obtained their details from a January leak at French crypto tax platform Waltio that exposed about 50,000 users.