Special agents' blood and urine test results stolen in FBI hack

A cyber-criminal group claims to have stolen highly sensitive medical records for thousands of FBI special agents, including blood and urine test results, doctors' notes on allergies, and references to conditions such as "blood in the urine" and "high cholesterol." BBC News reviewed samples that also included agents' names, addresses, phone numbers, badge numbers and job titles. The FBI confirmed a breach and said it was "aggressively investigating," but has not said whether attackers accessed its systems directly or through a third-party provider.

The hackers, who call themselves ShinyHunters, say a flaw in an Oracle-run cloud storage system the bureau relies on let them reach several internal platforms, among them the investigative database BICS, the medical-records system MedLink, the background-check tool BEAST and the jobs portal FBIJobs. Rather than money, they want the FBI to retract a May advisory that they say "offended" them, threatening to publish the full dataset within five days if it does not comply. Reuters reported that agents tied to Russia, China and drug-cartel investigations were among those exposed, and 404 Media reported that a little-known FBI hacking unit may have been affected.

Initial estimates put the number of affected employees at 38,000, but ShinyHunters now claims the true total could reach 60,000 current and former staff. Security specialists Etay Maor and Jamie Akhtar warned the data could enable blackmail and impersonation of officers, and Ciaran Martin, former head of the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, called the breach "as serious as it gets" if confirmed.

Summarized by PolitiKool from BBC’s reporting. Read the full story at BBC →