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.
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. Reuters could not verify the authenticity of the screenshot, but the job site did appear to have experienced recent disruption. 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. 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. ShinyHunters is one of the world’s most notorious and attention-seeking hacking crews.
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. 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. 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. 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. News of the FBI breach was first reported by the news outlet 404 Media. (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
The FBI said the agency “is aware of claims regarding unauthorised activity affecting FBIjobs.gov and is currently investigating. It said it had stolen data “on almost ALL FBI Agents, and individuals who filed an application with the FBI for a job. A message posted to the site on Tuesday said that both it and the FBI “Special Agent Applicant Portal” were “currently unavailable. A person familiar with the matter said that the job descriptions in the data also matched in at least some cases. 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. “Once that information is stolen, it is used forever,” she said. 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 centred 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.
