ShinyHunters hackers say they breached FBI, stole employee data

ShinyHunters hackers say they breached FBI, stole employee data

ShinyHunters says it retaliating for a May FBI warning about the hacking group

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 respond to repeated messages from Reuters 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 the group's methods and advised targets not to pay. It said it had stolen data "on almost ALL ​FBI agents, and individuals who filed an application with the FBI for ⁠a job."

It 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."

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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. Attempts to reach the people ⁠whose details were in the sample data were unsuccessful.

Same group was behind Canvas hack

ShinyHunters is one of the world's ⁠most ⁠notorious and attention-seeking hacking crews.

Its recent ​break-ins include the purported theft of millions of business records from video game developer Rockstar Games, ​the maker of Grand Theft ⁠Auto, and a May intrusion centered on education tool Canvas that caused widespread disruption across schools around the world, including several Canadian universities. Earlier this month, AI company Anthropic said it had caught ShinyHunters-linked hackers trying to use its tools.

On Sunday, the group told Reuters it had gone to war against another notorious cybercrime group, cl0p, ⁠in a rare bout ‌of public score-settling.