ShinyHunters claims FBI hack: 'This is NOT financially motivated'

ShinyHunters has claimed to have hacked the FBI and obtained over 2 terabytes of employee data. The group says their motive is not financial, but rather to force the FBI to correct false allegations made about them. A spokesperson for the hacking group told The Register, "This is NOT financially motivated. We want the FBI to correct or retract their statements, which included substantial false allegations." However, the FBI has not yet responded to The Register's request for comment on the matter.

According to ShinyHunters, the group exploited an Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day vulnerability on the FBI's jobs webpage, enabling remote code execution on the servers. This move allowed the hackers to deface the website, replacing it with a banner stating "This site has been seized by ShinyHunters." The group claims they then moved laterally onto the FBI's managed servers on AWS GovCloud and downloaded 2 TB to 3 TB of data, which includes information on current, former, and prospective FBI employees.

The compromised FBI services include human resources, MedLink, and Criminal Justice Information Services. ShinyHunters also claims they have access to data on all FBI employees and applicants. Neither Oracle nor AWS have responded to inquiries regarding the alleged zero-day vulnerability in PeopleSoft and any knowledge of the data theft.

The spokesperson for ShinyHunters emphasized that the group is not seeking an extortion payment, but rather wants the FBI to retract statements made about them in a May 15 bulletin, following their breach of ed-tech giant Instructure's Canvas platform. The FBI had accused ShinyHunters of using "harassment strategies, sending threatening text messages and phone calls to victims and their family members, and in some cases, swatting." Despite these allegations, ShinyHunters denies these claims.