FBI investigating after ShinyHunters claims massive data theft
The FBI said it is investigating a claim by the hacking crew ShinyHunters that it stole up to three terabytes of personnel data from the bureau's FBIJobs.gov portal.
ShinyHunters says it entered the careers site through a zero-day flaw in Oracle PeopleSoft, tracked as CVE-2026-35273, then moved onto FBI-managed servers on AWS GovCloud. The group defaced the site on September 22 and shared a sample of 5,000 records with names, phone numbers and home addresses, according to reports.
The FBI confirmed on Friday it was aware of the claim. A bureau spokesperson told The Register the point of entry was still undetermined — whether a third party or the FBI's own systems — and that investigators were working with the providers behind FBIJobs.gov. The portal remains offline.
ShinyHunters claims to hold data on almost all current, former and prospective agents, and says the theft was about reputation, not ransom. The FBI has not confirmed the scope of any breach. The case will test how federal agencies handle zero-day flaws in the enterprise software they rely on.
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