'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees
116 points by spenvo 4 hours ago | 63 comments
https://archive.ph/96YBP

jacobgold 15 minutes ago
At this point, no one seems capable of keeping a large database safe. I assume all medical and biographical information that exists is in the hands of the major state actors.

China hacked 22.1 million records of US government employees:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Office_of_Personnel_Manag...

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Taek 7 minutes ago
Google seems capable
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tdhz77 4 minutes ago
Mythos can do much worse
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reactordev 31 minutes ago
There’s a scene in Battlestar Galactica (2004) where someone asks Captain Adama why the Galactica doesn’t have networked computers. So the cylons can’t hack the ship…
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gchamonlive 7 minutes ago
I think it's one of the first two special episodes right at the beginning of the series, and it's the sole reason why the fleet could sustain evading the cylons
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mikeyinternews 19 minutes ago
this is the way
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mjhagen 4 minutes ago
So say we all
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corvad 27 minutes ago
Looks like it was an Oracle PeopleSoft 0-day so I imagine there are a lot more systems vulnerable.
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ctkhn 11 minutes ago
I wonder if that was really a 0-day or an intentional backdoor?
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whynotmaybe 6 minutes ago
> data totalled between two and three terabytes.

That's lot of data for a list of employees.

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tencentshill 2 hours ago
Well that's a big one.

Perhaps firing expertise and hiring incompetents wasn't a good idea.

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baggachipz 32 minutes ago
I always assumed DOGE + Ka$h would create an impenetrable fortress of strength; a beacon on the hill of brilliance and security.
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classified 6 minutes ago
If you use Trump Coins to reflect the Evil Eye away from you, nothing bad can happen to you.
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rayiner 44 minutes ago
Doesn’t seem new. Do you remember the 2015 OPM hack? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Office_of_Personnel_Manag.... My data got leaked in that.
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consumer451 8 minutes ago
Was that the one where due to political grand-standing, we had a government shutdown that led to furloughing the contractors who worked on security, so no one was watching the dashboard? Or was that a different one?
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freejazz 13 minutes ago
Probably just one of the new recruits clicking on a link while viewing beastiality
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nateb2022 2 hours ago
There's incompetence in every major company including Oracle. PeopleSoft isn't known for being the most modern or secure thing out there. Less reliance on 3rd party software like this will be a good thing going forward.
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lenerdenator 43 minutes ago
That's assuming that the result of this will be to switch away from PeopleSoft.
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Zigurd 22 minutes ago
Not even the FBI has hostage negotiators good enough to get you out of an Oracle contract.
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quickthrowman 9 minutes ago
I imagine Oracle lawyers to be identical to the Cylons pointing guns at President Gaius Baltar and forcing him to sign death warrants on New Caprica.

https://youtu.be/2_nUztwPiEY

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nateb2022 39 minutes ago
I think enterprise software in this vein used to have a quasi-monopoly due to the sheer work required to build software of its size (not enough engineers exist in the government to do so), and the difficulty for competitors to enter regulated markets and so pretty much 1-2 options to choose from.

AI now makes it possible to build this kind of software in-house, offering a 2nd choice, though it'll only be as good as the standards of the teams using it. Only time can tell.

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sarchertech 29 minutes ago
Enterprise software is complicated mostly because of number of customers it can support.

Bespoke software can be orders of magnitude less complex. There are many reasons companies choose to use vendor solutions, but for large organizations it’s usually not “we literally can’t hire enough engineers to build it.”

There are so many counter examples.

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0cf8612b2e1e 22 minutes ago
Considering how bad most enterprise software is, I assumed the only real relevance was if the sales team ponied up some lavish perks to the right VP who only has to sign checks and never actually interact with the software.
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mc32 59 minutes ago
Do you think this is a consequence of the seemingly quarterly RIFs at Oracle? Is it that offshoring wasn’t such a good idea?
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lenerdenator 45 minutes ago
The irony, of course, is that this will likely have a negative impact upon Oracle's reputation, which will have a negative impact upon its value, which will then be resolved with more RIFs.

It's okay. Larry got another island.

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jmclnx 8 minutes ago
I doubt it, look at all other breaches over the years.

If anything Oracle will "contribute" a lot to congress people's midterm reelection and in a few months all will be forgotten and Oracle will get more Gov. contracts.

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Romanulus 25 minutes ago
[dead]
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Betelbuddy 47 minutes ago
Lets hope the Epstein files see the light of day, thanks to AI...
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steveBK123 14 minutes ago
Claiming they got all employee & spouse data.

Wondering about pets..

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smalltorch 3 hours ago
Thats a major attack on the US.

If your systems are compromised and need to coordinate, what do you even do if you can't trust anything, assuming the attacker is still inside the network?

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Joel_Mckay 34 minutes ago
In general, most governments have standard operational policies that mitigate such issues (ISO 15408.) =3
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dvh 29 minutes ago
ISO and ICC start with the same letter, just saying...
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Joel_Mckay 25 minutes ago
The International Cricket Council does have very strict rules. lol =3
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lenerdenator 36 minutes ago
Is it, though?

If the goal is to exfiltrate data, I guess it is. If the goal is to make the people working in the FBI feel vulnerable - and pushing out this sample data would suggest that it is - I don't think it is. You could probably do the same with data from social media sites and data brokers.

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smalltorch 21 minutes ago
Uh yeah, it dangerous. Public data brokerage doesn't identify FBI agents in a master roster?

Consider open investigations with covert agents. Leaking their identitys could compromise entire investigations.

Hopefully there was some foresight in washing undercover agents from these systems to other secure ones or something otherwise that's pretty bad.

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sieabahlpark 11 minutes ago
[dead]
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Apocryphon 3 minutes ago
Remember how the original Mission Impossible movie (1996) was about the bad guys getting the NOC list? This feels somehow even worse than that.
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corvad 29 minutes ago
Hmm ShinyHunters seems to be in the news quite a bit recently. Most high profile was the Canvas LMS hack last spring right during college finals. Wonder if there will be a ransom for this data as well.
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john_strinlai 28 minutes ago
they have been on an absolute roll for quite awhile now.
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KronisLV 22 minutes ago
That feels like publicly announcing that you want to be in a lot of trouble.
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Ancapistani 10 minutes ago
Meh - I'll believe it when I see the actual data.

Qilin allegedly hacked BATFE about a month ago, and the files were never posted to their site.

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bearjaws 10 minutes ago
America is at war and losing comically.

Every day 2 major organizations get hacked, whether by groups or state actors, and America continues to sit on its hands.

The government should be creating a new digital defense department to better defend our country, and fund the defense of our nation, but instead it is busy renaming lakes and renaming "AI".

Almost like its run by a bunch of 80 year olds...

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levocardia 23 minutes ago
So, what are the odds this was done with an open-weight LLM?
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jgalt212 20 minutes ago
If I use Claude or OpenAI swarm to commit crimes, and the vendor knows I'm up to no good, what's their liability? Do they plan to invoke the phone company defense?
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TZubiri 58 minutes ago
Is their name a reference to pokemon? Or to the meme that the FBI/CIA glows through the screen?
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bitwize 39 minutes ago
You're thinking of "glowie", "shiny" is def a Pokémon thing.
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yepyoukno 11 minutes ago
“Glowie” is a white supremacist slur for “Jew” or “fed” (they think the Feds are “a bunch of Jews”.)

They say glowie because they see Jews are n*s who are white. They “glow” (they’re not dark.)

It’s crazy hearing main stream mention this slur slang without awareness of its root or meaning.

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mech422 21 minutes ago
also an mmo thing - hunting for collectibles in game
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clint 40 minutes ago
They've been on an streak for over 6 years now, check out their wikipedia page.
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dgellow 4 hours ago
Im sorry given how bad of a situation that is, but it would be so ironic if they used Claude or codex for this
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ben_w 43 minutes ago
If the claim is true, I'd expect them to have used either those models or Grok or similar.

Of course if I was the FBI, I would make it so hackers trying to breach the system get a honeypot where all the data is fake, and with LLMs (even poor ones) it would be very easy to fake an entire alternative reality.

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iAMkenough 2 hours ago
In the same week the head of the FBI went on national TV to claim credit for increasing the bureau's use of AI by 605%, whatever that's supposed to mean.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

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giancarlostoro 44 minutes ago
It means when the FBI builds a case against you make sure your lawyer hires a competent forensic expert. I've seen and heard "expert" testimonies in some court cases that make me angry. There's people using tools that digitally "enhance" small images, and that gets presented as evidence in court. It bewilders me how adding pixels to an image is evidence.
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Simulacra 44 minutes ago
Again?
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kelseyfrog 3 hours ago
So they're getting access to a year's worth of free credit reporting for the inconvenience?
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giancarlostoro 47 minutes ago
...and this is how the FBI makes you a higher priority target, and you wind up caught.
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clint 44 minutes ago
US keeps arresting and charging people from this group for well over 6 years now, and this happens in 2026. They don't sound very scared.
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phendrenad2 16 minutes ago
Imagine the FBI's relief when the hackers only got a list of their employees, not the UFO files.
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applfanboysbgon 2 hours ago
Wow, that is bold. I wonder if they'll get away with it because incompetent leadership has decimated the US's capabilities? This certainly doesn't bode well for the US's odds against its nation-state rivals.
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htrp 2 hours ago
TLDR. A Peoplesoft (Oracle HR) instance was compromised which allowed movement into GovCloud (AWS)
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ok123456 46 minutes ago
PeopleSoft 0-day.

Just goes to show that the wall of IT bureaucracy does nothing. I'm sure they had an ATO, a several-hundred-page SBOM, compliance audits, etc.

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0xbadcafebee 37 minutes ago
The attackers exfil'd 3TB of data, which obviously included PII, from AWS servers. They should've had DLP, active monitoring, countermeasures, using a security vendor (you can set this up for AWS services using CloudTrail, CloudWatch Logs, etc). You're supposed to have that for sensitive government or military work, and it should have (at least) caught that much traffic going to a rando external IP, blocked and flagged.

If they did have it set up, then somebody wasn't doing their job. If they didn't have it set up, they didn't comply (which is also not doing their job). I see this all the time. The security analysts send tickets to people when they see major issues and nobody is held accountable for inaction. Management asleep at the wheel (which is also their cover, can't be blamed for what you made sure you never knew about).

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lenerdenator 40 minutes ago
It doesn't do nothing. It does make things somewhat harder to attack.

There was a time, 25-ish years ago, where exploits were thrown about like candy at a parade. The procedures you mention, along with other things, have made zero-days like these more valuable than gold.

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jimbob45 31 minutes ago
I’m skeptical that multiple terabytes of data were exfiltrated quietly. I’m struggling to see this as anything other than a bluff.
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iAMkenough 22 minutes ago
I'm less skeptical after seeing it happen to IDScan and terrabytes of government-issued IDs being exfiltrated quietly.

Still skeptical, but the FBI's vendors are just as vulnerable to 0-days as Hertz's vendors.

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