The digital extortion group known as ShinyHunters says it has breached the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and stolen data on thousands of bureau employees, according to Reuters and 404 Media.

The bureau did not reply to requests for comment. The group told Reuters in an online chat that it targeted the agency in response to a May 2026 FBI announcement that detailed its methods and advised targets not to pay, and posted on its dark-web site a screenshot of a vandalized FBI jobs site and what it described as a sample of the stolen data, including names, home addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and, in some cases, information about spouses. Reuters said it could not verify the authenticity of the screenshot, but a message posted to the FBI jobs site on Tuesday said the portal and the Special Agent Applicant Portal were “currently unavailable”. The news agency said it partially verified the authenticity of some of the alleged personnel data by running names and postal addresses against credit bureau records and previously breached data preserved by dark-web intelligence firm District 4 Labs: it found a match in at least nine cases, but could not establish where the data came from or whether it was stolen from the FBI’s internal systems as the group claims. 404 Media, which reviewed a sample of 5,000 employees, said some of the phone numbers in the list matched people with the same names, and reported that the group defaced the jobs site with the message “this site has been seized by ShinyHunters”.