United States: hackers steal data belonging to 5,000 FBI agents
The hacker group claims responsibility for the attack not for the purpose of extortion, but to force the FBI to remove an announcement which, they say, ‘falsely accused them’
Whilst a young Matthew Broderick, playing David Lightman in *Wargames*, accidentally gained access to the Pentagon’s secret military supercomputer thanks to his computer skills, the hackers who breached the FBI’s website did not act by mistake.
ShinyHunters is a group of hackers specialising in large-scale data breaches and extortion. They target major IT, financial and retail companies – as well as universities – often stealing the records of millions of customers. Among the companies affected are names such as Google, Ticketmaster, Pornhub and the fashion giant LVMH. In the last few hours, the FBI has joined the list.
The website for applying to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has in fact been compromised by a cyberattack carried out by ShinyHunters. The group is believed to have gained access to the personal data of 5,000 agents, including applicants. Home addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and even details about their families: the hackers are said to have stolen all this information. In total, it is estimated that between two and three terabytes of data were stolen.
The criminal group claimed responsibility for the attack by posting a message directly on the Agency’s website: ‘This site has been hijacked by ShinyHunters’. It was also a way of ‘mimicking’ the FBI and other government agencies, which use the same type of notice to signal that they have taken a website offline themselves. The hackers threatened that they had ‘much more than they let on’ in their message.
‘404 Media’, the news outlet that first reported the story and which appears to be in contact with ShinyHunters, has carried out tests to verify whether the information obtained by the group is true. The result? Some of the telephone numbers provided as evidence by the hackers are linked to staff at the US Department of Justice.
