ShinyHunters FBI leak

[Winehole23]

DOGE wrecked US cybersecurity so it could pilfer our PII last year, looks like it left the government vulnerable too

The theft by a criminal hacking group of reams of sensitive personal data involving potentially tens of thousands of former and current F.B.I. employees is emerging as one of the worst breaches of sensitive government information, leaving the bureau rushing to protect its personnel as an uncertain deadline loomed.


Nearly a week after the group, known as ShinyHunters, revealed it had pilfered intimate details about bureau personnel from the agency’s jobs portal and threatened to leak them online, F.B.I. investigators are still piecing together how the breach took place and the total damage.


The hack appears to have swept up home addresses, Social Security numbers, secretive job assignments and much more, according to a New York Times analysis of some of the records. Some are already comparing it to China’s breach of more than 20 million records from the Office of Personnel Management over a decade ago, considered so catastrophic that officials and lawmakers vowed to never let something like it happen again

“We are operating under the premise that the threat actor is also exfiltrating PII of all F.B.I. employees,” according to the memo, which was described by someone who had seen it, using the abbreviation for personally identifiable information.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/28/u...smid=url-share

[Winehole23]

Ciaran Martin, the former head of Britain’s cyberdefense agency, said the F.B.I. hack likely had “huge impact on the operational capability” of the bureau and could rank as one of the most consequential data breaches in history — graver even than the Office of Personnel Management burglary.


“Losing the data on 20 million federal employees to the Chinese was bad,” Mr. Martin said. “But you knew the Chinese weren’t going to sell or publish it.”

[Winehole23]

maybe we'll find out who did the bestiality

A Times review of the sample found that it contained a range of private personal data, including:

• The names, home addresses, phone numbers, work emails, Social Security numbers and birth dates and hire dates of current and former F.B.I. personnel.
  
  
  
• Names and numbers for spouses and other emergency contacts, including in some cases parents, siblings and even children.
  
  
  
• Employee identification numbers that are used for the Transportation Security Administration’s PreCheck program, which could aid spies in tracking travel itineraries of agents, including those that work undercover.
  
  
  
• Names of the units in which F.B.I. personnel are employed and their job les, as well as the names of supervisors. While some list mundane departments, others reveal extraordinarily sensitive assignments including counterintelligence, narcotics and various desks focused on Russian, Chinese and Iranian national security threats. F.B.I. agents in those roles are generally expected to zealously protect their work in such fields to avoid putting a target on their back.
  
  

Additionally, ShinyHunters said that it had stolen medical data about employees, including psychiatric records and do ents related to blood and urine tests. It also said that it had additional background check files on employees.

[Winehole23]

“It doesn’t take much imagination to picture scenarios where employees or their families could be threatened or harmed by this kind of information being released,” said Andrew Brandt, a threat intelligence researcher at the cybersecurity company Huntress. “The bigger worry is ShinyHunters selling the data to other criminal or nation-state groups who could put it to more damaging use, rather than dumping it themselves.”


Security experts said that given the breadth of the records, they would be of enormous value if they were acquired by foreign spies, who could then use the material to build elaborate dossiers on F.B.I. agents — including those who may be undercover or later assigned to such a post — and track them for years, if not decades. Aided by artificial intelligence, spies or hackers could also combine the information with other exposed data that is already in their hands or that is easily acquired on the dark web.

[Winehole23]