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.

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.

Public data brokerage doesn't identify FBI agents in a master roster?

Are you saying that Ethan Hunt was involved?

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...

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.

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.

Not even the FBI has hostage negotiators good enough to get you out of an Oracle contract.

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.

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.

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.

I know a guy who named his kid Kash (before orange man) and he regrets it.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Is their name a reference to pokemon? Or to the meme that the FBI/CIA glows through the screen?

You're thinking of "glowie", "shiny" is def a Pokémon thing.

“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).

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 :)

Glowie by TinklesTheGoat December 24, 2019

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.

...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.

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

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.

And unless those other systems are completely air gapped with no wireless or other access

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.

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.

I didn’t follow the whole thread. Just want to point out that over the last 10 years hacking air-gapped systems has been a primary objective. Hard drive clicks, keyboard clicks, CPU squeaks, speaker-to-speaker. Exactly what advanced adversarial AI would be specifically good at.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

That feels like publicly announcing that you want to be in a lot of trouble.

Imagine the FBI's relief when the hackers only got a list of their employees, not the UFO 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

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.

What info can be gleaned from that?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And how do you pay them? And how secure are their systems.

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

  int t = 4;

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.

learning to code isn't much of a hurdle... The difficult part is getting to know the language.

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

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Maybe banks and governments can secure themselves (and that’s a big IF) but it really feels like something fundamentally has to change.

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.

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.

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.

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 always possible

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.

not all systems are vulnerable to undervoltage attacks. For example, I don't think the iphone secure enclave is vulnerable to this.

Then there's decapping / depotting, a world of different types of microscopy - some destructive some not, directed EM attacks, etc.

And good security uses "defence in depth"

And automation has enabled "offense in depth"

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.

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.

There's always another layer. Always a potential exploit.

So what? Most attackers aren't nation state adversaries. They're some kid in Wyoming messing around with deepseek. We live in a world where most exploits happen because someone was running an unpatched, 8 year old copy of wordpress. Because they put their insecure mongodb instance on the open internet. Because they used admin / "12345" as the username and password. We don't need to make hacks physically impossible for a nation state adversary. Just really, really difficult and expensive to pull off.

Honestly. If people talked about physical security like they talk about computer security, you'd have people telling you that, because walls can be physically smashed through, they don't bother locking the front door to their house.

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

There's absolutely no way to account for humans, who can be tricked, or pressured, or just make human sized mistakes.

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

Fine. Make the universe work for it. The whole system becomes more resilient as a result.

Look at our immune system. Incredibly complex and clever, and able to keep us alive in the face of all sorts of pathogens. It exists because of this cat and mouse game, played over millions of years.

There's people in the highlands of PNG who regularly eat each other. Of course, many are thought to have died due to prion diseases. But now these tribespeople seem to have become largely immune to prion disease. Incredible.

Instead, most software is made by people with the philosophy of “if it looks like it works, ship it”.

I work in secure systems and it’s shocking how many people believe this - the incentives from management are all about it too.

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 finalizing, 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.

The issue is that in consumer and enterprise software, move fast-and-break-things outcompetes secure-by-default every time. Critical infrastructure needs to have a different set of priorities, but it’s very hard because the expertise is so thin on the ground. Why would anyone with the expertise to make these calls bang their head against the wall trying to educate bureaucrats about these things for $150k a year when they can easily make multiples of that in big software companies that don’t own that level of risk.

The problem isn’t that we lack the capability to make secure computers.

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.

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

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”

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.

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.

NASA was supposedly a CMM level 5 organization and they still managed to crash a mars probe because of bad unit conversions.

Did any martians hack the probe?

Jeff Goldblum with a thinkpad, maybe

Jev Goldblum? He’s all the hype today

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.

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.

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.

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

data totalled between two and three terabytes.

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.

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.

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?

Hasn't that db been pwned previously?

Trinity cracked the IRS dBase, not the FBI one.

That was a long time ago.

404 Media is doing a much better job at breaking major stories than mainstream media. Nice.

Mainstream media is all owned by right wing billionaires. Who do everything they can to appease the orange guy.

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.

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.

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.

"they hacked the Gibson man"

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.

When asked if ShinyHunters was going to attempt to extort the FBI, the representative said, “what we plan to do is not something I’d call extortion, maybe coercion... This is not financially motivated,” they added

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.

The worst? 100 FBI agents to do the chicken dance in DC for 30 minutes and then the database is sold to the Chinese

Man, that quote is gonna suck when it gets read out in the courtroom. Even with the FBI in the shambles it’s in under Kash Patel, if you’re dumb enough to say something like that on the record, you’re definitely not smart enough to evade capture.

We traced the call – it's coming from inside the FBI!

Full text of Shinyhunters' box on their site about the FBI labeled, "PSA - READ THIS NOW":

https://rentry.co/shtext

That defacement says, “this site has been seized by ShinyHunters,”

No archive but at least a screenshot: https://cyberinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/fbi-site...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49807388

The photo they put is a Pokemon so yeah probably their name is from it.

hinder clients trust in our organisation hoping nobody pays us. I wonder what kinda of clients they have

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.

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

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?