FBI personnel data recently stolen by the ShinyHunters hackers includes sensitive psychiatric and medical evaluation records, according to the hackers and documents reviewed by Reuters.
ShinyHunters, one of the world’s most notorious and attention-seeking hacking crews, first said it had breached the FBI on Tuesday. In the hack, the group obtained granular details about bureau employees and their assignments, Reuters previously reported, including sensitive work against Chinese spies, Russian intelligence, drug cartels and others.
The breach has already rattled the bureau, but now threatens to turn into a serious counterintelligence risk, said Eric O’Neill, a former FBI operative who founded the cybersecurity consultancy Nexasure AI.
O’Neill said the presence of medical data was a sign that the hack was approaching the same kind of magnitude as the 2015 intrusion into the Office of Personnel Management, which exposed millions of Americans’ sensitive clearance information, allegedly to Chinese intelligence.
He added that the data would be a powerful magnet for hostile spies.
“I would be shocked if Russian intelligence isn’t knocking on their door and saying, ‘We want that stuff, hand it over,'” said O’Neill.
The FBI declined to comment on the records. In a statement issued Wednesday, the bureau said it was “aggressively investigating” the reported breach.
ShinyHunters circulated the medical files to a small circle of reporters earlier this week after announcing it had broken into the FBIjobs.gov site and stolen what it claimed was 2 to 3 terabytes of data.
The BBC earlier on Friday reported that a blood and urine test document, was among the sample, but the presence of other sensitive files, including a mental health evaluation and other records, has not previously been reported.
Reuters was able to partially authenticate some of the half-dozen files in several ways, including running two social security numbers in them against credit bureau data, and lining up the date of a pre-employment mental health evaluation against a former FBI analyst’s LinkedIn profile. Reuters also matched the name of an FBI psychiatrist in the document to a LinkedIn profile with the same name and an identical job title.
In one case, Reuters was able to confirm with a person familiar with the matter that a medical professional listed in one of the documents as performing FBI evaluations was in fact doing so at the time, although the person could not authenticate the entire file.
The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter.
The psychiatrist and the FBI employees named in the data either did not return messages or declined comment.