Photo: Collected
A hacker group has claimed to have stolen a huge amount of confidential personal information of almost all agents of the US federal investigation agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), their families and job applicants to the agency. The much-discussed and controversial cybercriminal group ‘ShinyHunters’ announced this major cyberattack in a message on the dark web.
In May, the FBI itself had issued a worldwide warning about this hacker group. This time the group has claimed to have targeted that very FBI and made off with a vast amount of data.
On its dark web leak site, the group claimed it was able to gain unauthorised access to the FBI’s central database. As a result, terabytes of sensitive information, including the names, home addresses and personal phone numbers of almost all the agency’s agents and job applicants, are now in its hands. As proof of the claim, it has published some samples and also shared a screenshot of a hacked page of the FBI’s recruitment website. International news agency Reuters said that although some of the leaked information was initially found to be authentic, it could not be fully confirmed independently whether it was really stolen from the FBI’s servers.
After the incident, the FBI has not officially admitted or denied the entire data theft, but said it is looking into the situation. In a statement sent to a technology news outlet, a spokesperson for the agency said they are aware of unauthorised access or unusual activity on the FBI’s recruitment website ‘fbijobs.gov’ and the matter is being investigated seriously. Immediately after the incident, the agency’s main jobs website and the portal for applying for special agent posts were temporarily shut down.
According to ShinyHunters, the attack began with an intrusion into an Oracle PeopleSoft server widely used in human resources departments. From there, they cleverly got past the security perimeter and entered the Amazon cloud network designated for the US government, where all the sensitive information of FBI officials and applicants was stored. However, neither the cloud service provider nor the FBI has yet officially confirmed the authenticity of these technical details.
Surprisingly, even after making off with a vast amount of data, the hackers say there was no financial transaction or ransom motive behind it. The attack was mainly in protest against a cybersecurity bulletin published by the FBI. In that bulletin published in May, the FBI had claimed that members of ShinyHunters are involved in fraudulent acts such as threatening various organisations, mental harassment and fake emergency police raids to extort money. The hackers claim false accusations have been made against them; however, they have not said anything clearly about what will happen to the collected data if the FBI does not withdraw that notice.
