By Raphael Satter and AJ Vicens
WASHINGTON, Sept 22 (Reuters) – The digital extortion group known as “ShinyHunters” says it has breached the Federal Bureau of Investigation and claims to have stolen data on thousands of FBI employees.
The bureau did not immediately reply to messages seeking comment on Tuesday.
ShinyHunters said in a statement posted to its dark-web site and during an online chat with Reuters that it targeted the FBI in response to a May 2026 agency announcement that detailed ShinyHunters’ methods and advised targets not to pay. The group shared what it said was a screenshot of a vandalized FBI job site and what it described as a sample of its stolen data.
Reuters could not verify the authenticity of the screenshot, but a message posted to the FBI job site on Tuesday said that the site and the FBI “Special Agent Applicant Portal” were both “currently unavailable.”
Reuters was able to partially verify the authenticity of some of the allegedly stolen FBI personnel information by running the names and postal address details against credit bureau records and previously breached data preserved by the dark-web intelligence firm District 4 Labs.
In at least nine cases, Reuters found a match. However, the news agency could not establish where the data came from, or whether it had been stolen from the FBI’s internal systems as the hackers claimed.
(Reporting by Raphael Satter; Editing by Chris Reese and Daniel Wallis)
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