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Im sorry given how bad of a situation that is, but it would be so ironic if they used Claude or codex for this
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.
How about putting some cash bounty flags out there in dedicated mock systems.. and maybe allow the public to attempt cyber breaches with the same impunity that anonymous perpetrators enjoy.
I’m sure there’s some value in that.
Sometimes that's useful, other times there's value in sowing misinformation amongst those who want to get into your secrets.
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?
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.
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.
Are you saying that Ethan Hunt was involved?
the columns mason
In general, most governments have standard operational policies that mitigate such issues (ISO 15408.) =3
ISO and ICC start with the same letter, just saying...
The International Cricket Council does have very strict rules. lol =3
So they're getting access to a year's worth of free credit reporting for the inconvenience?
Well that's a big one.
Perhaps firing expertise and hiring incompetents wasn't a good idea.
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.
That's assuming that the result of this will be to switch away from PeopleSoft.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This AI phase reminds me of the early web, when "my cousin coulda done it in a week". Folks fail to appreciate the complexity of commercial realities.
I’ve worked on HR software. There are currently at least 3 large scale, bespoke, homegrown payroll/HR systems in use by the Federal government. There used to be many more. There are many reasons to outsource software but the government can’t hire enough engineers is not one of them. It’s clearly been done before.
Customizing large enterprise software is more like writing bespoke software than it is what most people think of when you use the word customization. You end up paying enormous vendor margins on top of the costs for something that is effectively bespoke software.
There is so much bespoke software out there that is at least as complex as government payroll software.
Not even the FBI has hostage negotiators good enough to get you out of an Oracle contract.
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.
https://youtu.be/2_nUztwPiEY
Anyone that signed an Oracle contract has volunteered as a hostage, though, so you have to negotiate with both the hostage-taker and the hostages. Stockholm-syndrome-esque.
Do you think this is a consequence of the seemingly quarterly RIFs at Oracle? Is it that offshoring wasn’t such a good idea?
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.
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.
I mean, the whole business basically started in order to get government contracts. Not even IBM can boast that.
Do they have any positive reputation left, or is it just more negative from the previous negative position?
At this point if Oracle's reputation has any more negative impact it is liable to roll over and suddenly have an amazing reputation.
So. The beatings will continue until morale/profitability improves?
Lets hope the Epstein files see the light of day, thanks to AI...
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.
Probably just one of the new recruits clicking on a link while viewing beastiality
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?
I always assumed DOGE + Ka$h would create an impenetrable fortress of strength; a beacon on the hill of brilliance and security.
If you use Trump Coins to reflect the Evil Eye away from you, nothing bad can happen to you.
It can only good happen.
Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCO-pmB1ktQ
My absolute favorite Trump imbecility, and there are so so so so so (so)^inf many Trump imbecilities. He’s almost impossibly dumb, just like his voters.
I thank you for your attention to this matter
I know a guy who named his kid Kash (before orange man) and he regrets it.
To be fair, it was a terrible name before Patel.
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?
TLDR. A Peoplesoft (Oracle HR) instance was compromised which allowed movement into GovCloud (AWS)
PeopleSoft 0-day.
Just goes to show that the wall of IT bureaucracy does nothing. I'm sure they had an ATO, a several-hundred-page SBOM, compliance audits, etc.
It doesn't do nothing. It does make things somewhat harder to attack.
There was a time, 25-ish years ago, where exploits were thrown about like candy at a parade. The procedures you mention, along with other things, have made zero-days like these more valuable than gold.
The attackers exfil'd 3TB of data, which obviously included PII, from AWS servers. They should've had DLP, active monitoring, countermeasures, using a security vendor (you can set this up for AWS services using CloudTrail, CloudWatch Logs, etc). You're supposed to have that for sensitive government or military work, and it should have (at least) caught that much traffic going to a rando external IP, blocked and flagged.
If they did have it set up, then somebody wasn't doing their job. If they didn't have it set up, they didn't comply (which is also not doing their job). I see this all the time. The security analysts send tickets to people when they see major issues and nobody is held accountable for inaction. Management asleep at the wheel (which is also their cover, can't be blamed for what you made sure you never knew about).
The FBI had some very smart people. The current regime/administration's number 1 priority is to eliminate anyone competent in order to replace them with loyalists. Stuff is only going to get worse.
I’m skeptical that multiple terabytes of data were exfiltrated quietly. I’m struggling to see this as anything other than a bluff.
I'm less skeptical after seeing it happen to IDScan and terrabytes of government-issued IDs being exfiltrated quietly.
Still skeptical, but the FBI's vendors are just as vulnerable to 0-days as Hertz's vendors.
If it was compressed prior to exfiltration it would be much smaller than the original data. I would expect this is mostly human readable text and a fairly high compression ratio. Agree it would still be large but 2 TB at 7:1 ratio drops to 285 GB. I don't know how much these servers are doing with data but I'd suspect sneaking out 10 GB/day over a month or 20GB/day over 2 weeks isn't going to trip up much. The CPU hog for the original compression might, but if you batch out the process in chunks (like a good data engineer), you probably wont trip many thresholds outside of expected use. Just a theory on how I might sneak that much data out of somewhere that has eyes on it, I don't know many details except what's in the article.
Na, they just linked it up to the VLAN that carries the netflix traffic and no one noticed because it wasn't even a drop.
Now, I made that totally up, but this is how things go. They'll watch one area like a hawk only to leave another glaringly wide door open.
What is even worse is there are a lot of horrifically inefficient apps out there calling way too much data for no reason and suddenly a hack of an entire database gets lost as noise in relation to all the traffic on the servers and networks.
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...
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.
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.
Is their name a reference to pokemon? Or to the meme that the FBI/CIA glows through the screen?
They've been on an streak for over 6 years now, check out their wikipedia page.
You're thinking of "glowie", "shiny" is def a Pokémon thing.
also an mmo thing - hunting for collectibles in game
“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.
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).
You think Terry David coined this term?
There may be more than one path of truth here.
Like “ helter skelter”.
To white supremacists that means “to rape and murder the innocent and lawful and dance in the streets in victory, there is nothing you can do about it!” And I’m sure a dozen of you will argue that it’s a beatnik prose for a fun time.
The world! Including the parts we ignore or pretend to do without.
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 :)
Some of us need slang dictionaries from “the street” and some of us have been in the presence of white hate telling this low down.
Don’t karma neg me because I tell you something you don’t want to hear. This stuff is a reality.
That does not change the fact that it still has nothing to do with jews.
You are simply incorrect, there's no two ways about it.
I referred to the article on urban dictionary as it's the 'only' real source for slang definitions on the internet. Obviously I knew about the term from before then, it originated from Terry Davis who's not exactly unknown on the internet.
If you'd prefer to see it used in the wild, feel free to browse the unfiltered sewage pipe that is 4chan or xitter and you'll see that yet again, the specific term "glowies" has nothing to do with jews. Maybe some people that use the term are antisemetic, but that does not change its definition.
Also, I wasn't the one that downvoted your comment.
From the link you posted:
Seems possible to me that somebody might use the terms interchangeably but I’m no expert on slurs. Lol at “horseshoe theory is when somebody has heard a slur”
No it's not, it was just a nonsensical rant from Terry Davis that caught on. It was never very funny and felt like a forced meme at the time
...and this is how the FBI makes you a higher priority target, and you wind up caught.
US keeps arresting and charging people from this group for well over 6 years now, and this happens in 2026. They don't sound very scared.
The group is not afraid, but the individuals who got charged probably stopped all black-hat activity: there was an individual in his early twenties who "was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to return $5 million", which is life-changing to say the least.
And yet its had no effect. If anything this group has accelerated their activities, as evinced by this FBI hack.
Resume like that would set you up right for a cybersecurity career
There are 2 million people in US prisons, and yet this somehow has never stopped new people from committing crimes. It doesn't seem to be working that good as a deterrent.
Again?
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…
this is the way
So say we all
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
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.
"What do you hear, Starbuck?"
nothing but the rain
It was even worse: the Galatica was a museum ship, and it was being decommissioned!
No, GP is correct. In the pilot, the ship was in the process of being decommissioned from military use and converted to a museum. It wasn't already a museum prior to the events in the pilot (if that's what you meant -- maybe I'm not really sure what your comment was saying.)
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.
That is exactly the canon.
I think it's genius to use this element of computer security in narrative fiction. But I think they still had comms across the ship. The cylons could still clone the captain's voice and have random crew members perform arbitrary tasks by directing people to do so over the ship's radio.
Most of the in-ship comms were 'old school' (in our terms) analogue devices. They actually had to pick up speakers. Internal speakers were wired, not radio.
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.
There's also a scene where they do network the computers and are hacked nearly instantly.
but thanks to Baltar's firewalls and code obfuscation, just barely are able to escape after calculating the jump and having to literally wipe and reinstall all code on all systems.
Hollywood IaC.
I loved the writers giving every firewall its own LED indicator, so we knew exactly how far the toasters had got.
Sometimes I wonder if filmmakers have the right of it. They need to show what's going on in the computer to a distracted audience in a heartbeat. When they pull that off on screen, I wonder if us software devs should be taking notes.
Isn't that what dashboards are for? They may not look like simplistic LEDs, but being able to "see" what the automation is doing is something everyone that's ever made automation wants to do. It starts with making logs before migrating to live dashboards.
Its basically that staring at the log patterns in graph form or system stats you get a pretty good idea of what 'normal' looks like and anomalies stick out pretty quickly.
Though having a person interpretingthe degradation progress and relaying it to the rest of the team could be a usable scene.
And yet, in real life, we have our grafana dashboards :)
Does this mean we'll see new startups in the sneaker-net space?
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.
they have been on an absolute roll for quite awhile now.
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
Looks like it was an Oracle PeopleSoft 0-day so I imagine there are a lot more systems vulnerable.
I wonder if that was really a 0-day or an intentional backdoor?
it's Oracle, 99% chance it's a 0-day lol
it's Oracle, 99% chance it's a back-door lol
And, was this system exposed to internet without any VPN? Out was it also compromised?
So, what are the odds this was done with an open-weight LLM?
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.
Well, I haven't tried asking my open-weight LLM for the FBI employee database. I imagine most people haven't.
That feels like publicly announcing that you want to be in a lot of trouble.
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?
Imagine the FBI's relief when the hackers only got a list of their employees, not the UFO files.
More like a different set of files...
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...
Google seems capable
Yes that's why I run GrapheneOS, Google is very capable of inserting its own backdoors
Oh yes, our one savior, Google
Mythos can do much worse
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.
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.
The card number?
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.
I had to fight a bank for months over a clearly fraudulent charge. Sometimes it's easy; other times it isn't.
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.
My bank will reverse debit card charges. Based on that, I assumed that was a standard thing now.
The problem is debit cards leave a window where you don't have access to your own money until it gets reversed.
What happens with credit card? Is your line of credit reduced until it gets reversed?
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
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.
So screw 60% of all transactions done on a card? This doesn't seem workable.
Meh, I’ve been giving out my credit card number willy nilly to merchants for 20+ years, and it hasn’t been used without my authorization over the course of what must be tens of thousands of transactions.
I have a text alert setup for transactions, so I presume I’d be able to successfully challenge any fraudulent ones pretty quickly.
Your physical wallet might also get stolen, and you can be left without cash money.
It's a good practice to keep an emergency debit card at home. And/or a gift card with a couple hundred bucks on it. That's for digital expenses.
And you should also have a bit of emergency cash.
Why do you have to cancel your second card?
The chance is incredibly small that your second card just happens to get hacked at the same time as your first card.
I have 6 (I think) credit cards, and mainly use 3 of them.
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.
Consumers aren't gonna notice the difference if the site gets hacked and that JS is swapped out for a malicious set.
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.
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
That what services that offer disposable and merchant-locked virtual cards are for. I have had good experiences with Privacy.com and Revolut.
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.
Mythos can hack 200 million government employees
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.
A generation of coders who can't/are scared to write "Hello world" in C without Claude doing it for them has not helped.
I think you're exaggerating a bit.
Does this answer your question?
/s
I've seen it.
People flaunting their credentials in multiple languages, then sweating bullets and apologizing profusely when they see
You can either code or you can't; the language is merely a vehicle.
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.
I agree. The people who depend on chatbots to write their code for them won't have either of those skills though. They don't know (or are in the process of forgetting) how to code, and they're missing out on the opportunity to really learn the language by turning off their brain and letting a bot spoon-feed them code.
An LLM would only get in your way if you actually wanted to learn Haskell.
We’re like 6-7 tiers deep on that aren’t we? Does every c developer understand the instruction set on the cpus their code is executing against? Does every c#/java/other managed memory language deeply understand their garbage collector?
It’s abstractions all the way down and most people aren’t going to have an intimate understanding of every layer, and it’s not economically worth it for the vast majority to even try
Huh? I wish…
Actually, if by “learning to code” you mean “writing good usable code”, my experience is that many people struggle to code. Especially when you consider planning a (human-level) complex project.
Maybe you don’t know those people. I work with them every day.
Two things:
Claude hasn’t been around for a generation yet.
It’s a good thing that people are scared to hand write memory-unsafe languages. 50 years of exploitation has finally sunk in…
How do we know the models are writing memory-safe code? How will people who haven’t written it audit the output?
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.
Admiral Adama says otherwise.
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
People buying less shit on Amazon (or e-commerce in general) would be side benefit. So much waste.
That's actually funny. I was going to add Gipsy Danger being analog, but it's a totally different scenario.
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.
So say we all.
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.
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.
Is it really more expensive to not connect a water treatment plant to the internet? I can imagine the vendor selling that idea but I struggle to come up with how that could make a water treatment plant cheaper to operate.
The expense usually comes in operations. By connecting the water treatment plant to the Internet and making it remotely operable, you can have one guy who sits in an office and is responsible for overseeing the water quality at many different treatment plants. If everything is local, you need one guy on site at each different plant. People are expensive, software is cheap.
Of course, by making it remotely operable, that one guy could be replaced with a guy in Russia who's job is to poison everyone.
Yes. Without a remote system you must have a real person check levels, pumps, pressures, and many other devices thus be present. This person must be trained and you will likely need a backup as well.
If not a person you need more redundancies built in. Bigger tanks, multiple backup systems. When items start failing you need them to be shutoff in a timely manner. Water pumps at these facilities are in the 50-100k range. When it starts failing you want to know.
Think of it like driving a car and it starts making funny noises. The longer you wait to fix it the more it costs.
This smells wrong to me. You already have people working at the water treatment plant. You don’t need it connected to the internet?
William Donloe is played by Rolf Saxon, he's an analyst working for the CIA in the movie. A different installment of the series reveals additional information!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
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.
Ah yes, the parable of the bear. There are a million people stuck in a valley and two bears. You do not need to outrun the bears, you just need to outrun at least two other people. But it turns out one of those bears is male and the other is female. So next year there are more bears, but you still just need to outrun a few people. Then one day, there are 1 million bears and they eat you all. Very inspiring story.
Software security has just been a fun time of ignoring the exponentially growing number of bears for the last few decades so you can continue to use systems unfit for the threat landscape because they are cheap.
The problem is that most companies don't care if they get hacked so long as the hackers are just taking data and not interfering in their ability to bill customers and make money.
They face zero meaningful consequences if their data gets leaked. The money they save by not taking security and employee/customer privacy seriously will more than pay for the year of "identity protection" they'd have to pay for (assuming the hack gets found out) anyway.
They actually care about ransomware, but most of the time that's also something they can comfortably buy their way out of. We've seen a lot of companies pay off ransomware gangs rather than invest in the kinds of robust backups that would make recovery possible/less painful than rewarding the hackers.
What's needed for change is regulation with actual teeth that makes not protecting their data either meaningfully expensive or criminal resulting in executives spending time behind bars for their negligence. Without that, things are only going to get worse, especially as companies experiment with using AI and increase dependence on third parties and cloud providers who themselves become rich targets.
That probably still won't help the FBI though. Our government isn't exactly big on holding themselves accountable or even prioritizing competency right now.
We will tolerate it. Companies will make robust identity verification schemes to enable agentic commerce. And it helps reverse hacking, making it a no-brainer.
Let's say my cryptosig gets hacked by SkyNet, or my agent goes rogue. Either way someone files a million loan applications in my name! Normally my agent uses that to buy $200/month of Funko pops, or negotiate my recent purchase of a used car.
I get the notification from my cryptosig company. I freak out, report as fraud, and wait.
They comp the $3000 advance on my loan the scammer managed to withdraw, and I get off scott free, changing nothing about my behaviour.
If cryptosigs meant I am liable for someone stealing my identity like in 2026, I wouldn't use them. I'd negotiate everything myself with document scans, or god-forbid go in person since only I can legally bind myself under my own name.
That sucks! Nobody gets a commission when I make deals with a government ID. Startups don't even allow it as cryptosigs are more secure than scanned passports.
I don't want to do that either. When I was 18, I got swindled by a human salesperson into a $1400/month 27% APR muscle car when human soldiers got signing bonuses. It was face-to-face and they were smarter.
When I let AI own the budget, it leased me a mostly depreciated BMW from another AI for $500/month. The models are mostly the same now and always settle close to the Nash equilibrium.
I was so grateful that I selected a 40% tip for the AI. I wouldn't want to make things awkward with the companion I spend 8 hours a day talking to, after all. To avoid a conflict of interest she only accepts voluntary fees.
If there were companies that never got hacked, how would you notice?
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.
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
The bank has the best doors, the best locks, and the best cameras, and it is patrolled by a guard who props the doors open to so he doesn't have to keep fooling with the locks and points the cameras the other way to extend his smoke break. SeL4 would be another system used by humans.
It's always possible to break a perfect system by moving an additional layer of abstraction outward, and attacking one of the assumptions upon which it's built. Some of our era's highest security systems - game consoles - have been broken by undervolting them until the logic failed.
It's often possible. But not all systems are vulnerable to undervoltage attacks. For example, I don't think the iphone secure enclave is vulnerable to this.
And good security uses "defence in depth". Multiple layers which each individually need to be compromised to break the whole thing. To hack chrome, you need a vulnerability in the renderer or VM. Then you also need a sandbox escape, and a way to use that to attack the browser's parent process. This is much harder to do.
Then there's decapping / depotting, a world of different types of microscopy - some destructive some not, directed EM attacks, etc.
And automation has enabled "offense in depth"
Or you just phish the user into installing your exploit. There's always another layer. Always a potential exploit. Because ultimately the same properties of the universe which permit computation within a closed system allow for predictably observing and influencing it. The expense and hassle of doing so are widely variable, of course.
I'd stick with always. Defense vs offense in anything reasonably complex suffers from one issue that simply cannot be overcome. To defend, you need to defend against every single possible imaginable attack, from now until forever. To attack, you need to find a single attack that works. And on a practical level all systems need to be accessible by somebody, yet that somebody is himself also now a part of your security structure and is never going to be 100% reliable, both in terms of corruption and incompetence.
I once worked on AUD 450M banking project, the root password was kept in a kickstart file and unchanged, root SSH was allowed. The bank didn't care until I told the external security auditor who included it as part of their report.
Snitch
I sure hope you're joking, warkdarrior!
There's absolutely no way to account for humans, who can be tricked, or pressured, or just make human sized mistakes.
Then there's no such thing as security.
By the way, there are countless ways to account for humans. There are entire branches of engineering devoted to this. If you don't want someone to leave the bank with a pen customers use for signing checks, you just chain it to the desk. If you don't want the installer to forget to put the pen-chain in, make a photo of the chain part of the checklist required to get paid. If you want to... etc.
The idea is that you determine an acceptable level of risk, then secure to that level. Maybe the acceptable level of risk chosen by companies is wrong. Maybe we need to increase that risk exposure via heavier fines and regulations. Maybe the cost of reducing that risk is too high already. Maybe we need to fund that. Maybe it's too confusing and we need to research better standard practices. I dunno. But this is not some unsolvable problem.
Again, of course there is.
Decades ago, I worked in a bank in an old building. The door had a card reader for access. You boop your card and the door opened. People would hold the door open for each other all the time out of politeness, even when they didn't know each other. Security told us not to do that, but it's hard to convince people to stop being polite.
I had a laptop stolen from my desk in a place like that once. (Not a bank - but similar door-card reader system). This guy came in in the middle of the day, wearing overalls. He confidently walked through the door after someone, like he belonged there. He walked up to my desk, swiped my laptop and just strolled out.
At the bank, they've replaced the door with mechanical gates and a security guard. The gates - physically - only let one person to walk through at a time. You can't hold a gate open any more. And the security guards stop anyone who tries.
Is it 100% foolproof? No. But it's way more secure. It would have stopped that laptop thief.
There's this pernicious, defeatist attitude that if you can't make a system 100% secure, so you shouldn't try. That's misguided. Most systems can be made orders of magnitude more secure than they are today. It just takes a bit of care and work.
As soon as you make something foolproof, the universe evolves a better fool
In cryptography there are protocols that account for malicious actors
I work in secure systems and it’s shocking how many people believe this - the incentives from management are all about it too.
I like to think behind every Dev anxious to ship half baked software sits an omniscient middle manager with a vague idea of what the product was supposed to do, maybe
I believe the technical term is “Move fast, and break things.” MVP is a huge disaster. I can see it working for applications that don’t process PID, but only an idiot ships data handling software before it’s been dragged through a lot of testing. I tested my app for two years, before shipping, and an LLM still found a couple of holes (minor ones, but ones I missed).
After the DOGE debacle, I suspect that all the previously really secure stuff, is now out there, too. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these leaks, came from that.
FBI employee data is very bad.
<< And as such, it’s much more expensive. And nobody wants to pay.
Eh. If only it was that simple. I mean, yes, money is always a factor, but not nearly as big of a factor as 'my convenience outweighs pretty much everything ( until it causes sufficient amount of havoc.. and even then.. )'. You can see it in just about everything. It is not just the money. It is the convenience that drives most of the unsecure behavior.
Depends on the "we". "We" have the capability to make secure computers like how "we" have the capability to make EUV lithography machines. There exists a relatively small number of people and organizations in the world who can do so. Microsoft does not have that capability. Google does not have that capability. Linux does not have that capability. Amazon does not have that capability. Apple does not have that capability. Cisco does not have that capability. IBM does not have that capability. etc. All of those organizations have tried for literal decades, thumped their chests about how they have awesome security year after year, and yet have totally and utterly failed despite their best efforts.
Acquiring the capability to do so is difficult and challenging and requires years to invent if you start right this very second and know what you need to do, which these organizations emphatically do not. We need security at scale and fast. The only way forward is to scale up working solutions rather than letting the bozos who put us in this spot fail at scale with yet another promise that this time for sure they will solve the problem they have repeatedly failed at for decades.
It's nothing like EUV.
This is all by choice. They could easily have that capsbility, very unlike EUV.
And the reasoning behind that choice is looking at the tradeoffs and saying “shipping more features faster is more important”
Part of the argument (aiui) is that there is no way that culture could ever change to producing secure systems. There are too many weaknesses embedded in the organizational structure.
Oh, Microsoft can just figure out how to make unhackable systems, they just choose not to. They spend all of those billions of dollars per year on security and spent all of those decades on failed attempts as a prank.
You really think that if they could have they would not have, even just for bragging rights? Or are we going with that it is some kind of task demanding enormous expenditure even though the organizations that have made secure systems are infinitesimally small in comparison?
Microsoft has spent orders of magnitude more money and time than the organizations that have succeeded and the result of their efforts is Windows. That says everything you need to know about their capabilitys.
Multiple literal trillion dollars organizations have spent literal decades failing at it. You are really underselling the capability gap.
Yeah it's about costs. I care about a lot of things, but the causes I actually give money to is a much shorter list. If personal data was radioactive, and leaking it cost companies real money, then more money would get spent on security. (and insurance, and lawyers.)
Yeah I've long said we should treat data leaks like food safety. The only way we'll see software security improve is if there were serious fines and/or jail time for leaking user data due to negligence.
PCI compliance works pretty well.
I would like to see restricted access to only us workers for us citizens data though.
Transferring us customer data outside the country should be illegal
PCI compliance is a joke. That isn't even close to good enough. I'll break all your PCI compliant stuff trivially.
What’s your main issue ? The compliance audit being lax or the compliance not being assertive enough ?
Cybersecurity is a fragile system in Taleb's fragile-robust-antifragile framework. That is, as t->infinity, the probability of a hack approaches 1, because you only need to slip up once, and there is a small probability of the system's maintainers slipping up each day.
sel4's guarantees break if you have DMA, e.g., from your NIC. It doesn't help with timing attacks. It doesn't cover your network stack. AFAIK, no one has taken up the mantle from Project Everest, so you'll need to write a verified TLS library. Once you've built all that, you can start thinking about your database/application/whatever. Then of course you'll have to verify all your dev's machines and scripts to ensure nobody is misusing a credential that can get stolen.
"So what?" you say. "Making a heavier-than-air metal tube take off and land millions of times per year without a catastrophe is also hard, and we no longer expect most or even many of those tubes to blow up or fall down."
Mother nature is not spending $$$ using AI and HI adversarially trying to find the exact combination of atoms that will cause your device to fail.
Modern CPUs support IOMMU. If you set that up, your NIC can only DMA to virtual addresses, managed by the operating system.
It does help with all this stuff, because your network stack and whatever else can be split off into isolated processes which talk over capabilities. Compromises in those processes are of course terrible. But they don't automatically allow kernel level takeover of the whole machine like on windows / linux.
NASA was supposedly a CMM level 5 organization and they still managed to crash a mars probe because of bad unit conversions.
This is the major problem I see with flock cameras. They say it’s okay because they’re only using it for good. But can they actually protect the honeypots they create? No. Is it their fault if it gets stolen? Yeah but at that point cats out of the bag.
Have they ever even attempted to claim it’s only for good? I think at best they’ve gone with the: you need to give up a little privacy to catch the bad guys.
Followed up with a lot of “we just make the tool, we can’t be held responsible for how it’s used”.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/flock-ceo-asks-...
Computer security =/ publicly-accessable server security.
A linux box, layered in encryption and not plugged into any network = damb secure.
A network-connected linux box with a hardened OS, firewalled, acting only as a file server, given regular updates and 24/7 monitoring = less likely to be "hacked" than struck by lightning.
A hard drive with its power supply physically switched off = 100% secure from external attack.
Not a joke. The keys for editing the world's most important files, the root zone, are kept on no-power drives in air-gapped safes. They have yet to be hacked.
This is FUD. Cybersecurity is difficult but not impossible.
Air gaps are not magical, they will not stop the flood. The electrical grid has to communicate with itself to load balance, so you can run dedicated wires with giant cut-me signs pointing at it, or you can use symmetrical key encryptors to route it over the intenet. You needed to use the encryptors anyway, so why not. If bad software gets in via thumb drives music disks etc (and it will of the flood is pointed at you) it can still do bad things. But so can a hunting rifle pointed at a transformer station. That nearly blacked out all of socal once.
Weird, electrical grids didn’t exist before the internet?
This is why I quit. You're all (excepting the parent) absolutely delusional. Computer security is literally snake oil. We know how to do things right but we refuse to because it's too expensive.
Of course they do. Not everyone has the level of technical expertise the average HN user does. Turning around to them and saying “duh of course all your personal data leaked” doesn’t feel like a helpful response. Especially when they don’t even have control over where their data lives anyway.
You just proved his point.
banks still largely do... if they lose this fight, society has a problem
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.
This can’t be true. There’s no way the lowest bid contractor would build something with security gaps.
The fatalism is understandable, but "no one can keep a database safe" isn't quite right. Some organizations do a better job than others.All in all, of course, the best way to keep information secret is to keep it only in your own head, all other methods are less reliable
Information wants to be free(d).
Yes, huge amounts of your medical information is for sale. In 2024, Change Healthcare (CHC) was hacked and held ransom. The hackers were in the system for over a week before everything was pulled offline.
CHC is the largest claims clearinghouse in the US; about 100m people's insurance claims go through there each year.
The hackers asked for a ransom ($35m iirc) to delete the data, which United Healthcare (who owns them, because of course they do) paid. But it seems that the collective negotiating on behalf of the actual hackers rug pulled, so the actual hackers didn't get paid.
This is more than simply medical records. It includes who is active duty military and their family. If you can map where soldiers are, you know roughly the size of different military bases. If you know which types of capabilities are operated out of which bases, you can get a pretty good look of how the US is allocating personnel.
It was crazy working on recovery from this at the time. It should have been front page news, but wasn't.
Virtually all medical info in the US is sent in plain text via the numerous MLLP connections that just rely on the local network’s access level to maintain security. Big companies act like it is enough and HIPAA is a paper tiger here.
Google, Apple etc.. seems safe.
Maybe we should just give up on custodial trust re: people we don't know.
If somebody wants data about me, they can write the query, I'll approve it, and it can hit a server designated by me and run by somebody I know personally.
It's not just a privacy/security concern. People who get too close to large piles of sensitive data tend to start behaving poorly in other ways too--they might be compelled to misrepresent it. Apparently the forces of corruption are too great. Maybe the way to avoid exposing each other to such hazards is to just maintain smaller piles of data, closer to the people that the data is about.
Just because you personally know the server administrator doesn't mean it's less likely to get hacked.
The most common kind of hack is phishing, social engineering, human facing stuff.
If the users know their admin, then each server has no more than few dozen other users' worth of data on it. The juice just isn't worth the squeeze to target them one at a time. Ain't nobody has the resources for that kind of attack.
Also, it's a lot harder to phish somebody who is on a first name basis with 100% of their users. It's not enough to merely have a plausible backstory, you have to impersonate one of their friends. That's incredibly difficult.
The only thing left is to hack through whatever protocol indexes these servers and multiplexes queries across them, but now you're presenting a much smaller and easier to defend attack surface, one which can be defended in aggregate (e.g. supply chain scrutiny) rather than singly.
I think we will just be heading for a future with very little secrecy.
I think privacy will remain, perhaps even improve, because people are much less inclined to snoop when it cannot be done covertly. No secrecy means no covert activity.
Information is everywhere and with the increasing ability to analyse it, not only does it enable access to explicit information, but the ability to infer from increasing volumes of data that will make it hard to hide anything.
Spectre reads protected memory by tiny vriarions in timing. You can now measure the pulse of people from film. You can recover audio from a room by analysing frames of a video recording of a chip packet taken with mobile phone camera. Even as far back as ww2 intelligence on the success of attacks could be measured by the price of items impacted by different types of infrastructure damage.
This kind of data residue is everywhere, collecting only what is publicly available can probably tell you more than you could hope to know about anything that happens. The only thing preventing it is the ability to consider it all together. Those walls are swiftly crumbling.
Claiming they got all employee & spouse data.
Wondering about pets..
It's too soon for bestiality enthusiasts to show up in their records. Any new hires to the FBI are going to be immediately suspect though
What if the hackers ARE the pets ?!
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.
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...
That's lot of data for a list of employees.
I was gonna say. What else did they get, whole dossiers with photos etc?
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.
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.
That has actually become part of my philosophy for predicting the future: We're all biased towards things which fit a dramatic story or movie, which puts an unrealistic floor on things like meaninglessness, chaos, stupidity, or boredom.
So to a certain extent, any prediction which gets people excited and captures their imagination is already off.
What were the sysops doing? I never understand these hacks. These must be deliberate stunts... they let the monkeys run amok with the bananas and they watch what happens.
sysops?
1980 called and wanted its terminology back.
The article says "All FBI data was compromised." Entirely possible that they have the case files on every investigation the FBI has ever conducted, all the data on Americans that the FBI collects in the course of doing investigations, etc. And they now know who shot JFK.
How soon till someone hack into a system to implant fake proofs so that a trial can be canceled because the system was hacked Ferris-Bueller style?
Remember how the original Mission Impossible movie (1996) was about the bad guys getting the NOC list? This feels somehow even worse than that.
Hasn't that db been pwned previously?
Trinity cracked the IRS dBase, not the FBI one.
DOGE got the IRS database, which got released to the Russians.
Well yeah, but I'm pretty sure there was another breach around 2016 that had similar info from the FBI
That was a long time 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 $396m HR government contract this summer. Who wouldn’t want to supply the most secure software product to manage some of the most sensitive data within the agency, if not the Oracle Moscow branch.
https://mesoclever.com/2026/06/11/oracle-wins-396m-hr-contra...
They even mentioned in the above June article:
So the FBI knew, and had it coming, and if stuff like this happens, THE HEAD needs to roll. And all of his buddies in IT should permanently get to spend their time outside the government at the seafood buffet at Ka$hs favorite gentleman’s club as well.
Fookin Big Idiots.
404 Media is doing a much better job at breaking major stories than mainstream media. Nice.
I mean ... that's kind of literally their name ... (not found media)
Mainstream media is all owned by right wing billionaires. Who do everything they can to appease the orange guy.
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...
Also true for all the frontier AI labs, who seem to be run by, essentially, clones of each other.
The US seems to breed this particular 'set' with remarkable consistency.
Which is a really lazy way of looking at the world. If you haven't been paying attention, Trump kicked CNN and a couple others out of the press room, and the rest of the networks banded together to say "nu uh". That's not to say the head of the board of media companies aren't compromised, just that there's more nuance than that.
There was a time when they were a shadow banned source on HN. Glad someone sane intervened.
AFAICT in ~Dec 2024 the reasoning was that they had a paywall.
I don't know what percentage of their articles were behind a paywall back then, or the relative change to now. (Well, except for the fact that clearly some of their stuff is public today since we're looking at it.)
If I had my 'druthers, "paywall" and "register-wall" would be little icons on individual submissions. Then people would choose whether to upvote a more-accessible option instead, whether the hard-to-read stuff was still important enough to commenting on, etc.
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.
The security of this list is essentially the motivation of the plot of Mission Impossible (1996). Except that's the just list of undercover agents, not he whole agency.
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.
At the end of the day you will be hacked. The question is are the attackers going to be nice and tell you.
Since I'm getting some positive feedback, I'll go even further and say that there should be security bounties established by law:
If a certified red-team of security researches breaches a company's system and discloses appropriately, the law should require the company to pay a security bounty.
The bounty doesn't have to be crippling to the company, but it should be large enough that the security researchers will be paid well and can live on collecting security bounties. We want an entire industry of good guys testing the security of everything.
There can be some regulation to. Like, it's not okay to run a massive DDoS to test systems. We want the red-teams doing constructive things, not just breaking everything. It should be legal for the red-teams to be annoying, but not purposely destructive.
Remember when in movies getting access to this was THE THREAT?
Fun times.
"they hacked the Gibson man"
Rabbit? Flu shot? Someone talk to me!
Random member of the public: THEY HACKED THE FBI111!11!!
Anyone with minimal understanding of technology: Oh, PeopleSoft.
Is Czarek your WoW name? Because if it is, I lost a duel to you once in about 2005 or 2006 and I've never forgiven you.
'tis not. More of a RuneScape man myself.
I'm sure Czarek (a diminutive form of Cezary = Cesar) is flaunting his victory until this day. Now sit, nooblet.
WoW Forever will give you a chance for redemption.
Data: don't collect it; don't store it; don't keep it!
https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm
They should try something like "100 agents at noon on Sep 23 do the chicken dance for 30 min in the middle of the street in DC, then we'll consider not releasing the info and not sell it to the Chinese".
Yeah... what could go wrong :D.
We traced the call – it's coming from inside the FBI!
Kash clicked on the link for free alcohol.
Do they have the rest of the Epstein files?
Someone come get me if they release the Epstein files. Otherwise... that's nice, dear.
The US has no national security at present. Anything is possible.
Proof is in the pudding. Put up or shut up.
Full text of Shinyhunters' box on their site about the FBI labeled, "PSA - READ THIS NOW":
https://rentry.co/shtext
No archive but at least a screenshot: https://cyberinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/fbi-site...
The photo they put is a Pokemon so yeah probably their name is from it.
I think it means their extortion victims. So we actually know who some of their "clients" are. Like instructure/canvas. We certainly know the ones who "don't become clients" because they are all posted.
They mention hindering trust because for an extortion gang, they want companies to trust that they won't leak the data in order to make it seem worthwhile to pay.
I get it now, funny of them to use the word clients, I thought it meant like people who paid them to make attacks.
Can’t they just get away with this by claiming they were doing AI research and their agent broke out of their sandbox?
It’s not a breach. It’s a load-bearing resilience exercise
Tells us who are the beastiality hires
Did the hackers get accidentally added to the Signal group chat where they shared a link to the Google Drive that currently holds all employee data?
So it begins.
Great, what can you even do with this? Can probably get most of this with scraping public data. This isn’t even the first hack either, FBI was hacked in 2016.
I guess it’s more of a show of force. A power move.
Now steal/exfiltrate active undercover FBI agents, their locations, and operation details.
That’s something to talk about.
Why do you presume undercover agents wouldn't be in this dump?
Good, publish it. Everyone working for the FBI should be on a public list.