Data of FBI employees may have been leaked
The ShinyHunters hacking group has claimed to have stolen data belonging to current and former employees of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as individuals who applied for employment. The FBI announced that it is investigating reports of unauthorized activity related to the FBIjobs.gov website. It has not yet been independently confirmed whether the data was obtained specifically from the bureau's internal systems.
Information regarding FBI employees may have been leaked
According to DW, the digital extortion group ShinyHunters claimed on September 22 on its darknet site and in an online chat with Reuters that it had carried out a cyberattack on the FBI.
The group called this action a response to an FBI warning published in May 2026. That message detailed the hackers' methods of operation and advised against paying ransoms to extortionists.
In its statement, ShinyHunters claimed to have obtained information on "almost all FBI agents and individuals who applied for jobs at the bureau." However, the scale of this claim has not been confirmed.
As proof, the hackers provided a screenshot showing that the FBI's recruitment website, FBIjobs.gov, had been defaced. They also presented information on nearly 5,000 agents as part of the stolen database.
Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the screenshot. However, the agency noted that there had been recent disruptions in the website's operation.
An FBI message on September 22 stated that FBIjobs.gov and the Special Agent Applicant Portal, intended for special agent candidates, were temporarily down.
The sample provided by ShinyHunters reportedly contains the names, home addresses, Social Security numbers, job titles, and in some cases, the names of family members of FBI agents.
Reuters journalists compared the provided data with information in credit bureaus and data from previous leaks stored at District 4 Labs, a company that analyzes darknet data.
In at least 10 cases, including information related to FBI Director Kash Patel, matches were found. A source familiar with the situation told the agency that information about the job titles of some individuals was also correct.
However, Reuters was unable to determine where this data was obtained from and whether it was stolen from the FBI's internal systems, as the hackers claimed. Attempts to contact the individuals whose data was presented in the sample were also unsuccessful.