'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees (404media.co)
212 pointsby spenvo5 hours ago155 comments
jacobgold an hour 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...
Taek an hour ago
Google seems capable
1attice 29 minutes ago
Yes that's why I run GrapheneOS, Google is very capable of inserting its own backdoors
redanddead 24 minutes ago
Oh yes, our one savior, Google
tdhz77 an hour ago
Mythos can do much worse
titzer an hour ago
And the city wonders why I don't want to put my credit card info in their crappy parking app and would instead prefer to put a quarter into the meter for 30 mins.
lotsofpulp an hour ago
What info can be gleaned from that? Surely the mere fact that you have a credit card means your name and billing address are floating around.
I guess your parking history around town could be valuable if someone is targeting you.
ceejayoz an hour ago
> What info can be gleaned from that?
The card number?
Barbing an hour ago
In USA, folks who check their statements monthly are at little risk of immediate financial pain there.
When your lifetime of credit card transactions leaks, that could be financially painful, embarrassing, etc. (can be discriminated against, including with pricing)
I do dislike creating a log of where I park on some random company’s server. Nice that ALPRs/govt.-funded corp spycams/Ring/etc. make sure the quarter method is minimally marginally effective at protecting privacy.
ceejayoz an hour ago
> In USA, folks who check their statements monthly are at little risk of immediate financial pain there.
I had to fight a bank for months over a clearly fraudulent charge. Sometimes it's easy; other times it isn't.
chrsstrm an hour ago
In 2026, having my credit card number compromised is the least of my worries. At least here there is an established process for denying charges and ordering a new card. As long as you're not using a debit card, this is not a big deal.
dylan604 an hour ago
My bank will reverse debit card charges. Based on that, I assumed that was a standard thing now.
bluGill an hour ago
The problem is debit cards leave a window where you don't have access to your own money until it gets reversed.
asdff 14 minutes ago
What happens with credit card? Is your line of credit reduced until it gets reversed?
dylan604 13 minutes ago
Only time I've seen that is the stupid holds that hotels do for deposits. The time I had the bank correct a debit card issue had the money available immediately. The only real hold on the account was waiting for the new card to arrive, but the funds were available
pixl97 30 minutes ago
Ok, your card is compromised. It's been cancelled.
One, how much money is in your pocket so you can eat?
ok, you'll use your second ca.... oh, it has to be cancelled now too.
Ok, lets wait a few days for another card, and lets go use it the first time, what hacked already, I guess I need to wait a few more days.
>As long as you're not using a debit card, this is not a big deal.
So screw 60% of all transactions done on a card? This doesn't seem workable.
dylan604 an hour ago
who stores card numbers other than the processors? that should be a hangable offense. I've integrated card processing on multiple sites, and not once does the form come from me. I add the processor's JS, and it collects the data to move along. They then return to me a bit of information that includes success/fail so that I can decide what to do from there.
ceejayoz an hour ago
> I add the processor's JS, and it collects the data to move along.
Consumers aren't gonna notice the difference if the site gets hacked and that JS is swapped out for a malicious set.
pixl97 28 minutes ago
Yea, it's insane seeing this person arguing about the nature of credit card theft when we have a million different examples of how it happens and how rarely the end user knows until it's far too late. We almost always learn about itpost ad hoc.
dylan604 11 minutes ago
You've moved the goal posts. A typical site isn't storing the numbers so when they get hacked, that data is not available. If you're suggesting hackers directly injecting malicious JS to hijack card data then that's totally different. I'm not insane about this particular subject. You're just standing on a soapbox
ceejayoz 6 minutes ago
The parent post just says "I don't want to put my credit card info in their crappy parking app".
"I'm only talking about long-term storage" is itself a goalpost move!
simur an hour ago
Yeah, about the medical information. Recently in Poland there was a hack on the medical system called MyDr that is used by commercial medical facilities.
Estimated 21M people could've been affected.
So it is already happening and the scariest thing is, we don't have control on where our data is stored on. Even the EU GDPR didn't make it easy to control what data lands where.
ChosenEnd an hour ago
Mythos can hack 200 million government employees
coldpie an hour ago
It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security after so many years of nonstop hacks and leaks. If you have a computer and it is connected to a network with access to the Internet, assume that computer is semi-public. Meaning, if someone was interested enough in accessing your computer, they could do it. Do not hook any computer with access to anything that would be devastating if it was made public to the Internet. Do not put anything that would be devastating if it was made public onto someone else's Internet-connected computers.
For example, do not hook your goddamn water or traffic or electricity infrastructure up to the goddamn Internet, and then, do fire the guy who suggested it.
The correct analogy for computer security is not locks and keys and doors and gates. It is a house in a floodplain. Your house will not survive the flood of it hits you. Do not store anything critical or irreplaceable in that house.
sippingabonedry an hour ago
A generation of coders who can't/are scared to write "Hello world" in C without Claude doing it for them has not helped.
passwordoops an hour ago
I think you're exaggerating a bit.
Does this answer your question?
/s
sippingabonedry 44 minutes ago
I've seen it.
People flaunting their credentials in multiple languages, then sweating bullets and apologizing profusely when they see
int t = 4;
BoxwoodSeed 22 minutes ago
I agree, but then learning to code isn't much of a hurdle. It's a similar effort to learning vim. The difficult part is getting to know the language. I never coded in Haskell for example and learning to use that language would take effort. On the other hand, it would be pretty easy with an LLM at hand.
It might even help in figuring out whether Haskell would be a good fit. Something I couldn't do, as I do not know the language. Then again, it's not a question that really gets asked much in a corporate setting. Most things are just solved in a few popular languages, whether that makes the most sense or not.
shepherdjerred an hour ago
It used to be that nothing was secure but that was OK because at least adversaries would have to expend effort. If you are one of a million companies why would anyone hack you. Maybe if you are a target you need a lot of investment, but most orgs only prevent the most egregious of vulnerabilities.
The calculus has certainly changed. Hacking is becoming even more frequent and… I’m not really sure what the equilibrium looks like.
It’s not really an option to stop using computers or networks. But it’s going to be way too expensive (or maybe even impossible) to secure even just critical systems.
Maybe banks and governments can secure themselves (and that’s a big IF) but it really feels like something fundamentally has to change.
throwup238 43 minutes ago
> It’s not really an option to stop using computers or networks. But it’s going to be way too expensive (or maybe even impossible) to secure even just critical systems.
Admiral Adama says otherwise.
shepherdjerred 35 minutes ago
The military has significantly different incentives.
Even just consider banks and e-commerce. They are hugely lucrative and making them even a tiny bit less accessible directly impacts their revenue. As an example, Amazon seeing that latency has a measurable effect on purchase behavior.
Maybe the military (fictional or otherwise) can go back to the ARPANET but most economic activity created by the internet cannot afford to disconnect
SilentM68 34 minutes ago
That's actually funny. I was going to add Gipsy Danger being analog, but it's a totally different scenario.
pixl97 32 minutes ago
I mean he is a fictional character.
In the real (fake?) world the toasters would shoot smart dust all over your crap that would assemble back on your circuits creating radios between all the different components. They were fighting an adversary that was far more advanced than them.
kridsdale1 15 minutes ago
So say we all.
BoxwoodSeed 35 minutes ago
I am reminded of the scene of a guy walking through various layers of security to access a computer that isn't connected to any network and still wonder what the hell this guy's job was in Mission Impossible (1996). The data got stolen either way, because of course it did, but what highly sensitive work can you even do on a computer not connected to any network?
If there's too much security in the way, it seems to me that work becomes impossible.
coldpie 26 minutes ago
We had water and traffic control and electricity for decades and centuries before the Internet. It is less convenient and more expensive, but it also means hostile countries can't literally poison your drinking water from across the planet. It's not a difficult trade to consider.
pixl97 34 minutes ago
>The calculus has certainly changed.
Adding AI into this really is just changing it to how much money your adversary is willing to spend to break in. The moment one crack in the armor shows up countless agents with unending patience can start embedding themselves everywhere in timeframes way faster than human actions. You could quickly find out all the special sauce for your company has been copied who knows where.
Working with banks when the Glasswing/Mythos first came out and they were given access to it has given me direct access to their infosec departments that are panicked. They've been sitting on piles of bugs for years that were low risk enough, and they have seen in their own tests how fast they can be probed.
Worse those infosec systems that have identified the risks in their software that aren't yet fixed are nuclear waste vats just waiting to get spilled to the wide world.
skybrian 30 minutes ago
If there were companies that never got hacked, how would you notice?
drdaeman 21 minutes ago
There is such a thing, or, rather, used to be. Problem is that security is expensive (essentially one needs to examine all possible states of the system), and it inevitably failed to keep up with the crazy growth of complexity of modern computer systems. It became impossible to maintain a model of a system with myriad of moving parts, so it became impossible to make behavior guarantees.
Remove the complexity (all the way down to the hardware quirks), and security will be doable again.
GolfPopper 19 minutes ago
Many years ago, I regularly played cyberpunk tabletop RPGs with a number of other computer-inclined friends. We all used to laugh at ridiculousness of a key assumption of the game - the idea that giant corporations would ever connect their internal networks, full of valuable data, to the larger global telecommunications network.
shockwaverider 15 minutes ago
What could possibly go wrong - I worked in intelligence in the 80s and one day there was this story about the office of personnel management being hacked and I was like “Thank God all my shit is on microfiche in some dusty basement filing cabinet, like who would be so stupid as to scan that shit into a computer?” Sure as shit, like a few months later I get the letter that my whole TS/SCI clearance documents had been stolen :-)
sekh60 11 minutes ago
This. I have an OpenStack homelab and a fast home internet connection. I update things pretty much daily, apply best practices, etc. And despite that outside of a wire guard instance i still host public things on a pair of VPSes, security just moves too fast to risk the home network (important things are backed up remotely and all that). I try to update the VPSes daily. Haven't gotten popped yet (to my knowledge!), but I am sure it'll happen eventually.
josephg 10 minutes ago
> It is unthinkable to me that anyone believes there is such a thing as computer security after so many years of nonstop hacks and leaks.
Of course there is. For example, SeL4’s security and reliability proofs still hold in the world of LLMs. The problem is that most software isn’t written on that firm foundation. Instead, most software is made by people with the philosophy of “if it looks like it works, ship it”. You don’t get secure software by working like that, because security vulnerabilities aren’t visible.
We - humans - know how to write secure software. Just like we know how to make safe aeroplanes. The problem isn’t that we lack the capability to make secure computers. The problem is we don’t have a culture of security. Secure software is - somehow - niche. And as such, it’s much more expensive. And nobody wants to pay.
kakacik an hour ago
banks still largely do... if they lose this fight, society has a problem
primitivesuave 44 minutes ago
The recent Epic vs Health Gorilla lawsuit is an example of how your medical records have almost certainly made it to the hands of many people you will never know about.
clickety_clack 7 minutes ago
This can’t be true. There’s no way the lowest bid contractor would build something with security gaps.
reactordev 2 hours 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…
mikeyinternews 2 hours ago
this is the way
mjhagen an hour ago
So say we all
gchamonlive an hour 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
ishouldstayaway an hour ago
It's not just a scene; it's the whole premise of the setting. It's why the Galactica survived and the newer ships did not. It's why the new Vipers got wiped out and they had to pull the old ones out of mothballs.
In the pilot, the Galactica was literally being turned into a museum, and that's why they lived.
28304283409234 an hour ago
"What do you hear, Starbuck?"
ronburgandy28 33 minutes ago
nothing but the rain
jshier an hour ago
Which was always pretty stupid. At best it means the Cylons can't hack the whole ship, just whichever part they exploited to gain access remotely in the first place. But really the Cylons would've needed exploits for each individual system anyway, since simply connecting them with wires shouldn't just do that. And unless those other systems are completely air gapped with no wireless or other access, it would be trivial for them to still gain remote access, or have one of their infiltrators provide a local connection of some kind. AFAIR that was never a plot point, which was odd.
joshheitzman an hour ago
> And unless those other systems are completely air gapped with no wireless or other access
That is exactly the canon.
reverius42 an hour ago
> whichever part they exploited to gain access remotely
I think you missed the point of "no networking", you have to actually physically sit in front of the computer. There is no remote access.
dylan604 an hour ago
There's also a scene where they do network the computers and are hacked nearly instantly.
corvad 2 hours ago
Looks like it was an Oracle PeopleSoft 0-day so I imagine there are a lot more systems vulnerable.
ctkhn an hour ago
I wonder if that was really a 0-day or an intentional backdoor?
paimapi an hour ago
it's Oracle, 99% chance it's a 0-day lol
tencentshill 3 hours ago
Well that's a big one.
Perhaps firing expertise and hiring incompetents wasn't a good idea.
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.
lenerdenator 2 hours ago
That's assuming that the result of this will be to switch away from PeopleSoft.
nateb2022 2 hours 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.
sarchertech 2 hours 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.
0cf8612b2e1e 2 hours 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.
nateb2022 an hour ago
> Bespoke software can be orders of magnitude less complex.
Not in government. For payroll/HR, we're talking about hundreds of pages of legislative mandates, union bargaining rules, Title 5 statutory compliance, and FISMA/NIST regs. Just customizing something like PeopleSoft to fit is a large task in itself, let alone trying to implement bespoke software using an engineering pool that isn't even large enough to modernize the software it currently owns.
Bespoke sounds nice and works well in startups but that's not the context we're discussing. Check out Phoenix Pay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system and understand the US is even more complex.
Zigurd 2 hours ago
Not even the FBI has hostage negotiators good enough to get you out of an Oracle contract.
quickthrowman an hour 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.
mc32 2 hours 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?
lenerdenator 2 hours 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.
jmclnx an hour 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.
dylan604 an hour ago
> have a negative impact upon Oracle's reputation
Do they have any positive reputation left, or is it just more negative from the previous negative position?
jandrese 43 minutes ago
At this point if Oracle's reputation has any more negative impact it is liable to roll over and suddenly have an amazing reputation.
Tangurena2 32 minutes ago
So. The beatings will continue until morale/profitability improves?
Betelbuddy 2 hours ago
Lets hope the Epstein files see the light of day, thanks to AI...
rayiner 2 hours 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.
freejazz an hour ago
Probably just one of the new recruits clicking on a link while viewing beastiality
consumer451 an hour 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?
baggachipz 2 hours ago
I always assumed DOGE + Ka$h would create an impenetrable fortress of strength; a beacon on the hill of brilliance and security.
classified an hour ago
If you use Trump Coins to reflect the Evil Eye away from you, nothing bad can happen to you.
debo_ an hour ago
It can only good happen.
Bengalilol 23 minutes ago
I thank you for your attention to this matter
sippingabonedry an hour ago
> Perhaps firing expertise
The expertise that told them to buy PeopleSoft years ago, or do you actually believe the FBI home-rolled its own HRMS in the last year?
Are they related to the expertise that was supposed to lead to the immediate, irreparable offlining of Twitter after they were all fired?
TutleCpt an hour ago
404 Media is doing a much better job at breaking major stories than mainstream media. Nice.
johnnyApplePRNG an hour ago
I mean ... that's kind of literally their name ... (not found media)
Tangurena2 31 minutes ago
Mainstream media is all owned by right wing billionaires. Who do everything they can to appease the orange guy.
autoexec 6 minutes ago
Even those in mainstream media who aren't ideologically aligned face pressure from threats and retaliation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump's_conflict_with_t...
JumpCrisscross 5 minutes ago
There was a time when they were a shadow banned source on HN. Glad someone sane intervened.
1970-01-01 an hour ago
If this was 1992, we'd be retelling and celebrating the hack for decades.
1992 was 33 years ago; this is almost an unremarkable event. It will be superseded by whatever happens in AI news by the end of the month.
whynotmaybe an hour ago
> data totalled between two and three terabytes.
That's lot of data for a list of employees.
AraneaDev an hour ago
I was gonna say. What else did they get, whole dossiers with photos etc?
Tangurena2 26 minutes ago
The 2015 OPM hack got every application for a security clearance. Which includes every place you lived for the past 15 years with names and phone numbers of people who knew you there. I expect the FBI data includes similar stuff. And because the FBI deals with financial crimes, I expect the data also includes bank account statements/transactions.
We as a country need to start treating PII as radioactive - that touching it or keeping it anywhere near your computer network is a company-ending disaster about to happen. The legal standard needs to be strict liability like CSAM or DUI.
asdff 12 minutes ago
>that touching it or keeping it anywhere near your computer network is a company-ending disaster about to happen.
Well, that would require such leaks to result in a company ending disaster. Instead they keep chugging as normal and the customers who got their information leaked don't even move off the platform for greener pastures. What a boring dystopia we live in.
Buttons840 30 minutes ago
White-hat and grey-hat hackers need to be able to perform penetration testing without permission. Nobody is able to build secure systems. The best we can hope for is that the good guys find the vulnerabilities first and report them responsibly.
This would be a huge inconvenience for companies and government organizations, so it probably won't happen. We will chose to sacrifice national security for the convenience of companies--what else is new?
Companies will say "it is our system, we are responsible for our own system", then, after a breach, they will say "our bad, we are not responsible". Same old story; half the nation's personal information is leaked twice a month and nobody cares.
pixl97 27 minutes ago
At the end of the day you will be hacked. The question is are the attackers going to be nice and tell you.
smalltorch 4 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?
lenerdenator 2 hours 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.
smalltorch 2 hours 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.
dylan604 an hour ago
> Public data brokerage doesn't identify FBI agents in a master roster?
Are you saying that Ethan Hunt was involved?
Joel_Mckay 2 hours ago
In general, most governments have standard operational policies that mitigate such issues (ISO 15408.) =3
dvh 2 hours ago
ISO and ICC start with the same letter, just saying...
Joel_Mckay 2 hours ago
The International Cricket Council does have very strict rules. lol =3
corvad 2 hours 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.
john_strinlai 2 hours ago
they have been on an absolute roll for quite awhile now.
augment_me an hour ago
They got paid for the Canvas hack allegedly about 10M$ by Infrastructure, so it makes sense to continue. This one probably has a larger price tag
steveBK123 an hour ago
Claiming they got all employee & spouse data.
Wondering about pets..
KronisLV 2 hours ago
That feels like publicly announcing that you want to be in a lot of trouble.
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
ben_w 2 hours 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.
S-E-P an hour ago
Hasn't that db been pwned previously?
alexjplant an hour ago
Trinity cracked the IRS dBase, not the FBI one.
Tangurena2 25 minutes ago
DOGE got the IRS database, which got released to the Russians.
S-E-P 16 minutes ago
Well yeah, but I'm pretty sure there was another breach around 2016 that had similar info from the FBI
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...
giancarlostoro 2 hours 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.
Apocryphon an hour 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.
bearjaws an hour 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...
kelseyfrog 3 hours ago
So they're getting access to a year's worth of free credit reporting for the inconvenience?
TZubiri 2 hours ago
Is their name a reference to pokemon? Or to the meme that the FBI/CIA glows through the screen?
clint 2 hours ago
They've been on an streak for over 6 years now, check out their wikipedia page.
bitwize 2 hours ago
You're thinking of "glowie", "shiny" is def a Pokémon thing.
mech422 2 hours ago
also an mmo thing - hunting for collectibles in game
yepyoukno an hour 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.
phainopepla2 an hour ago
I think you have the etymology wrong, although there was (schizophrenic) racism involved in the coining of the term. The "glow" part doesn't come from the fact that they're white (or not dark), it comes from Terry Davis saying that "CIA n*'s glow in the dark" (i.e. are obviously spotted and can't hide their identities).
DaSHacka an hour ago
It would've taken you a 30-second google search to check yourself before posting this, where you would've seen this is wildly incorrect.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glowie
The term itself has nothing to do with jews, but its a fun self-report you think jews are disproportionately federal agents, the group constantly mired in human rights controversies towards minorities and abnormal connections to pedophiliac islands as of late.
Horseshoe theory, I suppose :)
levocardia 2 hours ago
So, what are the odds this was done with an open-weight LLM?
DaSHacka an hour ago
Uh 0%?
There are many people that run open weight LLMs. And unsurprisingly, they don't all have a copy of the FBI employee database.
If you mean "using" an open weight LLM in combination with other tools or even potentially frontier models, then that's a lot more likely.
fwip 7 minutes ago
Well, I haven't tried asking my open-weight LLM for the FBI employee database. I imagine most people haven't.
jgalt212 2 hours 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?
Ancapistani an hour 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.
Jamesbeam an hour ago
I will tell you where this gets really embarrassing for the FBI.
Oracle enterprise applications are a gold mine for attackers precisely because nobody treats them as security-critical systems.
In 2025 the Clop ransomware gang discovered that Oracle E-Business Suite has a critical vulnerability (CVE-2025-61882) that allows unauthenticated remote code execution.
Graceful Spider (tracked as Clop affiliates) started exploiting this in early August, well before Oracle issued a patch in October. That’s a two-month window where attackers had free rein.
All you need to know about Clop is that they got fucked by SH as well just a few days ago.
ShinyHunters defaced Clop's Tor leak site and added its own branding and messages. SH claims it stole source code, system logs, plugins, and Tor onion service keys. SH says it plans to give Clop 72 hours to respond to an extortion message.
Say what you want but these kids got balls. Won’t help them once SOCOM starts dealing with them, but they had a good run so far. I think hacking the FBI is as close as you can fly to the sun before the hammer drops.
In February this year they breached Wynn Resorts and lifted data on 800,000-plus employees. Can you guess the entry point?
If you guessed Oracle PeopleSoft, you were right.
Now you’d think the FBI IT people would have noticed that oracle software is a potential national security risk, if multiple ransomware groups keep focusing specifically on the shit Larry Elison personally have to seem vibe coded, over and over.
But Ka$h replaced most of the competent people at the FBI with Ka$h people and by pure luck Oracle won a $396m HR government contract this summer. Who wouldn’t want to supply the most secure software product to manage some of the most sensitive data within the agency, if not the Oracle Moscow branch.
https://mesoclever.com/2026/06/11/oracle-wins-396m-hr-contra...
They even mentioned in the above June article:
> Separately, the cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed to have exfiltrated student, financial-aid, immigration, health, and administrative records from PeopleSoft instances at more than 100 organizations, predominantly universities. The group stated it had previously targeted an *FBI PeopleSoft server* before pivoting to educational institutions already compromised in earlier campaigns. Oracle has not publicly confirmed the scope or remediation status of these incidents.
So the FBI knew, and had it coming, and if stuff like this happens, THE HEAD needs to roll. And all of his buddies in IT should permanently get to spend their time outside the government at the seafood buffet at Ka$hs favorite gentleman’s club as well.
Fookin Big Idiots.
Simulacra 2 hours ago
Again?
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.