FBI rushes to investigate if ShinyHunters hack of thousands of employees is real
It's unclear what will happen if FBI misses ShinyHunters' deadline.
The FBI is currently probing allegations from a hacker group, ShinyHunters, that personal data of thousands of current and former employees was stolen following an exploit of a previously unknown vulnerability on an agency jobs website. ShinyHunters took down the FBI jobs platform, FBIJobs.gov, on Tuesday and displayed a banner proclaiming the site had been seized by the group.
ShinyHunters subsequently posted the stolen data, which they informed The New York Times had amounted to approximately two to three terabytes. However, as of now, none of this data has been leaked. The information compromised, according to ShinyHunters, included "names of current and former agents as well as applicants and corresponding home addresses, phone numbers, names of spouses, certain medical information, and other data."
The potential misuse of this data is a source of concern, with Bloomberg noting that it could be employed to retaliate against FBI agents, possibly exposing sensitive professional information on their work focus, such as counter-intelligence activities against China, Russia, and Iran, as well as efforts to combat street gangs.
Written by urgent.news from Ars Technica Policy's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
