The FBI said Wednesday that it is investigating a notorious hacking group over its claims to have stolen data on agents.“The FBI is aware of a cyber-criminal enterprise group claiming a compromise of the FBIJobs.gov portal and alleged impact to FBI employee personally identifiable information (PII),” the FBI said in a statement.
“While the point of breach is still undetermined — whether a third-party or the FBI’s enterprise — we are actively and aggressively investigating this matter and working closely with those third-party providers that support FBIJobs.gov to mitigate any and all risk.”The hacking group, ShinyHunters, a cyber-extortion outfit that routinely hacks companies to steal their data and threatens to publish it on the dark web if not paid, said Wednesday that it had hacked into the FBI’s jobs portal and used that access to steal a major tranche of sensitive files, including ones that detail individual agents’ personal information.In a post on its website viewed by NBC News, ShinyHunters said the alleged hack was retaliation for a public service announcement about the group that the FBI posted in May.“We were very disappointed to see an agency of your standing would resort to such circulation of disinformation in an attempt to ‘disrupt’ our operations, an effort that ultimately proved unsuccessful,” it said.It disagreed with the FBI’s characterizations in its PSA and said it would publish hacked data in a week if the PSA was not retracted.A representative of the group claimed to NBC News that they hacked the FBI’s job portal Monday and then gained access to other agency programs, stealing between 2 and 3 terabytes of files.
NBC News was not able to verify the extent of their claims.The job portal site is currently inaccessible.An agency spokesperson said: “The FBI is aware of claims regarding unauthorized activity affecting FBIjobs.gov and is currently investigating.”Cynthia Kaiser, the former deputy cyber director of...