ShinyHunters, the hacking group that went viral in April after threatening Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar Games with a leak, is back with a much more dangerous scheme. This time, the group is brazenly going after the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Grand Theft Auto 6 fans may remember ShinyHunters’ actions from earlier this year, when the group tried to pressure Rockstar into paying a ransom. Rockstar met the threat with a shrug, leading ShinyHunters to release private data on the game development studio. Once the information was out there, Rockstar’s indifference made sense. Unlike the more recent GTA 6 leak, which was full of unauthorized gameplay clips, ShinyHunters’s data breach was largely about Rockstar’s financials. Evidently, Rockstar didn’t mind people knowing exactly how much GTA Online and Red Dead Redemption 2 players were spending on their respective games. Spoilers: Some of the most successful games of all time are still making bank.
The numbers were interesting to groups like journalists and analysts — companies like Rockstar might share financial data during investor calls, but those disclosures are broad. Knowing that GTA Online makes around $1 million a day is slightly shocking in that context. For most people, though, ShinyHunter’s leak was a big nothingburger.
Incidentally, the FBI issued a public service announcement about the ShinyHunters group a month before the hackers went after Rockstar. The prolific group had grown in notoriety after breaching institutions like Harvard University and Pornhub, and the high-profile security leaks were emboldening them to take on bigger targets. At the time, the FBI accused ShinyHunters of using “harassment strategies, sending threatening text messages and phone calls to victims and their family members, and in some cases, swatting.”
According to the New York Times, ShinyHunters took umbrage with that description. The group tried to retaliate against the FBI by stealing current and former employee information. The data was sourced from an online job portal, meaning that ShinyHunters also had access to intelligence on people who have applied to work at the FBI.
The breach reportedly includes “home addresses, phone numbers, names of spouses, certain medical information and other data” for tens of thousands of people, according to the New York Times. The group says that, unless the FBI corrects or removes the advisory within a week, it will release the trove to the public.
The FBI has acknowledged the security breach, but the organization is still in the middle of assessing the situation.
A spokesperson told the NYT, “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.”
Unlike the Rockstar breach, experts warn that the FBI leak could have real consequences for national security. If ShinyHunters releases the FBI’s information, it could theoretically be accessed by foreign intelligence agencies.