WASHINGTON, United States — ShinyHunters has threatened to publish FBI agents’ personal information unless the bureau withdraws a warning about the hacking group.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said on Wednesday, September 23, 2026, that it was investigating the group’s claim to have stolen files.
Reporting on the FBI data breach claim, NBC News said a former agent had authenticated a sample document supplied by ShinyHunters.
It contained sensitive personal information. The broadcaster said it could not verify the scale of the alleged theft.
The bureau said in a statement that investigators had not established whether the intrusion involved an outside provider or its own systems.
It said it was working with providers supporting its recruitment website, FBIJobs.gov, to address the risks.
Cynthia Kaiser, a former FBI deputy cyber director and now a senior vice president at the cybersecurity company Halcyon, told NBC that the disclosure of agents’ personal details could endanger them.
“This type of information could be used by criminals to target or physically harm FBI agents, personnel and their families,” Kaiser said.
Kaiser also said cyber-extortion groups could mix accurate claims with exaggeration.
A ShinyHunters representative told NBC that the group had entered the recruitment portal on Monday and subsequently reached other FBI programs.
The representative claimed that between two and three terabytes of files had been taken. NBC reported that the recruitment website was inaccessible.
The group tied its threat to a public advisory issued by the FBI in May.
In a statement on its website, described by NBC, ShinyHunters disputed the bureau’s characterisation of its activities and gave it a week to retract the warning before it would publish the purportedly stolen information.
Separately, Anthropic reported this month that it had repeatedly disrupted groups suspected of being ShinyHunters affiliates seeking to use its artificial intelligence in hacking operations.
Those efforts dated back to December.
