Dutch police have arrested a suspected member of the ShinyHunters cyber-crime group that claimed to have stolen sensitive information on all FBI bureau staff – around 38,000 people.
After the alleged attack last week, the group claimed to have every agent’s name, role, badge number and personal details including home address and phone numbers.
In a statement, Dutch police said it had arrested a 24-year-old man from Amsterdam on suspicion of being part of the group, which has also claimed other hacks.
The suspect was arrested on 15 September, before the alleged FBI attack. He is also suspected of attempted incitement to commit two murders, police said.
Police said they seized his devices and found a “large amount of information” on his laptop, including “details about two murders that were to be committed abroad” that they suspect he may have ordered.
The suspect has been held since his arrest. Dutch officials have not ruled out further arrests.
Stan Duijf, who leads Dutch investigations into cybercrime, said in a statement: “The ShinyHunters group is responsible for a large number of national and international victims.
“It is good that we have been able to arrest a suspect in the investigation into this group.”
Taking to X, FBI director Kash Patel thanked Dutch partners and said: “As we speak, FBI teams are actively working with partners to obtain and execute more leads in the ongoing investigation based on this arrest.”
Following the arrest, Brett Leatherman, assistant director of FBI Cyber, urged members of the group to hand themselves in “while the choice is still yours”.
He added: “Other groups believed anonymity or their friends would protect them… but arrests have a way of changing who is willing to talk.
“The longer you stay in this, the more we learn about you, you know how to find us, we know how to find you.”
ShinyHunters claimed to have breached the FBI’s servers on 21 September and began contacting reporters the next day sharing samples and screenshots of the stolen data.
The BBC has seen a small portion of the data, which appears to be genuine.
ShinyHunters is an international collective of hackers, believed to have originally started in France. It has been behind a number of high-profile breaches including on Rockstar Games in April and a highly disruptive hack on education platform Canvas in May.
The group claims to have found a vulnerability in the Oracle cloud storage system used by the FBI to breach multiple systems including FBIJOBS, FBI BEAST, which does background checks on employees and applicants, FBI MedLink, which holds agent’s medical records, and FBI BICS, which holds investigation information.
In its message on the dark web, the group said it did not hack the FBI system for money.
Instead, the cyber-criminals asked the agency to retract an advisory that it issued in May about the gang, saying it was “offended” by its characterisation.
The public service announcement, external, which is still up on the FBI’s website, described ShinyHunters as “threat actors” who often “use their real or exaggerated claims of access to sensitive or personal information to prompt payment from victims”.
“They target major companies across tech, finance, and retail, often stealing millions of customer records at once,” the advisory said.
