Cybersecurity

Just visiting a page or refreshing an app can be enough to fall victim to a malware attack in which your personal data is stolen from a laptop or phone, researchers have found. You are not even required to “click” on anything.

An Israeli spyware firm has been found to be behind the first-known instance of “zero-click” targeted advertising in which fraudsters or spies can steal private data and send it to external servers, with Al Jazeera journalists among the victims.

In June 2025, 45 devices used by Al Jazeera staff – including several who reported on sensitive subjects – were targeted with spyware which installed itself without the need to open or download any files.

An investigation by the Canada-based academic research unit Citizen Lab, prompted by Al Jazeera’s initial internal probe into the issue, discovered that the Israeli company Candiru was behind the attacks.

Analysts say the findings are “incredibly concerning”, as they confirm the existence of a new global security threat. “We knew we were headed in this direction and now it is out in the public,” Remesh Srinivasan, professor of information studies at the University of California in Los Angeles, US, told Al Jazeera.

“This is the next level, because people are being microtargeted,” he said. “This is the point we’ve come to when it comes to surveillance.”

How ‘zero-click’ malware works

Al Jazeera’s in-house technology team first discovered unusual patterns on devices used by some journalists in 2024. Analysis of network logs provided to the Citizen Lab by Al Jazeera in 2025 provided a clear temporal signature of how the attack was executed.

Malicious advertisements were bought by Discover-Tech, an Israeli company presenting itself as a legitimate advertising firm, but which actually operates as a facilitator for mercenary spyware partners.

Its advertisement network identified Al Jazeera staff, then quietly redirected them to an infected server belonging to Candiru. The spyware firm was blacklisted by the US government in 2021, when Citizen Lab found it was responsible for the illegal hacking and surveillance of at least 100 activists, journalists and political activists across 10 countries.

Al Jazeera Media Network has condemned the targeting of its staff members’ devices and called for those responsible to be held accountable.

Cybersecurity analyst and author Eddy Willems said the advertisements used automatically infect devices the moment they pop up on the screen, but there is an important technical nuance. “Executing code inside the browser does not automatically give an attacker full control over the computer,” Willems told Al Jazeera.

“To escape the browser’s isolated environment – the ‘sandbox’ – the attacker may need a second vulnerability,” Willems said, adding that an advanced spyware operation can combine several vulnerabilities.

“The attacker attempts to exploit vulnerabilities to bypass security boundaries. This is precisely what makes this type of attack so dangerous,” the analyst said.

Once the device is infected, the malicious software is designed to collect a wide range of sensitive data, including files, documents, and browser data such as cookies, bookmarks, and saved credentials.

It can also capture keystrokes, take screenshots, record microphone and webcam input, and extract emails and messages from popular communication platforms. To avoid triggering security mechanisms, the spyware often uses encrypted communication channels and breaks up stolen data into smaller chunks sent over time.

Advertising: A new global security threat?

Analysts say Citizen Lab’s findings point to the escalation of an existing threat, which expands the scale and reach of traditional cyberattacks and makes them much harder to detect.

While “zero-click” attacks are not completely new, the findings outline a new technique through which online advertisements are used as a route to infection.

Stephen O’Shaughnessy, a lecturer in cybersecurity at the TU Dublin Blanchardstown campus in Ireland, explained that when a user opens a website or app, an automated auction sells the advertisement space in a fraction of a second. That auction shares data about the victim, including the device ID, IP address, rough location and the app or site they are on.

“Discover-Tech posed as an ordinary advertiser, used that data to find their target and win the auction for that person’s screen,” O’Shaughnessy told Al Jazeera. “Anyone with a phone or browser that shows ads can be reached, without the attacker needing their phone number or email.”

“Because no message or link is involved, there is almost nothing for the victim to notice,” he added.

Discover-Tech appeared on lists of “certified” and “approved” vendors maintained by Google and advertising industry association IAB Europe, and has served advertisements via major networks such as Google, Yandex and Beeswax.

In its report, Citizen Lab said this illustrates the structural flaws in the online advertising system, which essentially failed to detect or prevent the abuse.

Discover-Tech advertisements have popped up on devices used by personnel in national-security-sensitive networks around the world, including those of various ministries of defence, armed forces, national cyber agencies, intergovernmental organisations and media outlets, Citizen Lab found.

The research unit said these advertisements have also appeared on networks used by the United Nations, NATO, the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of the European Union’s General Secretariat.

‘Almost nobody was watching’

Government networks have also been targeted in at least 24 countries, including the United States, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Australia, Russia, Mexico and Israel itself. Networks of media organisations have also been targeted, mainly in Australia, Denmark and Sweden, according to Citizen Lab.

In a separate report, New York-based advertising security firm Confiant said its own investigations had found that some of Discover-Tech’s advertisements also appeared in critical networks used by the Pentagon, the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Criminal Court.

O’Shaughnessy said infection has not been confirmed there – only profiling of users. “But that alone is concerning, he said. “The ad system was built to send code from strangers to billions of screens with pinpoint targeting. Almost nobody was watching it from a security angle.”

The analyst said the risk remains low for most people as these attacks are expensive and aimed at specific targets. “For individuals at high risk, like journalists and officials, the best first defence is to install an ad blocker, switch off their advertising ID through their phone’s privacy settings, keep everything updated, and turn on Lockdown Mode or Android’s Advanced Protection,” he said.

Precautions also need to be taken within the industry and at government level. “To combat this, the ad industry needs to properly vet who’s buying ads,” O’Shaughnessy said, while “regulators need to stop personal data being sprayed out to thousands of unknown bidders in every auction.”

Citizen Lab investigation says dozens of Al Jazeera devices were infected by malware planted through advertisements.

Israeli advertising technology company Discover-Tech helped place spyware on dozens of devices used by Al Jazeera and other companies, a Citizen Lab investigation prompted by Al Jazeera’s own initial internal probe has confirmed.

Al Jazeera Media Network on Thursday said it “condemns the targeting of devices belonging to several of its employees with spyware”.

“The network voluntarily collaborated with the researchers, and this cooperation, according to the report, contributed to verifying these attacks and publicly documenting them.”

Al Jazeera will continue to “protect its employees and systems”.

The network said targeting journalists is an “assault on press freedom and the public’s right to knowledge” and called for those responsible to be held accountable.

Spyware from Candiru, a firm blacklisted by the United States government in 2021 for its malicious cyber activities, was planted on these devices, using what Citizen Lab described as the first-known instance of “zero-click” targeted advertising.

The Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary research unit at the University of Toronto, concluded in its report that Discover-Tech purchased the advertisements that had the spyware built in. It then directed devices to Candiru’s malware through these advertisements. The millions of devices that were pointed to the malware include several that belonged to Al Jazeera’s journalists – including several who reported on sensitive subjects.

Al Jazeera’s internal technology team first discovered unusual patterns on devices used by some journalists in 2024. The pattern continued into 2025. Al Jazeera reached out to Citizen Lab for a more detailed investigation into its suspicions that spyware was responsible.

“Analysis of network logs provided to the Citizen Lab by Al Jazeera collected during the attack period provides a clear temporal signature of how the attack was executed,” the University of Toronto-based team said ints report published Thursday.

The “zero-clock” nature of installing this spyware means that once an infected advertisement appears on a device, that device, too, is infected — spying on, and feeding, all the data and information available on that platform to those stealing it.

Meanwhile, New York-based security firm Confiant said in a separate report that some of Discover-Tech’s advertisements also appeared in critical networks used by the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Criminal Court.

Candiru’s spyware has previously been used to carry out surveillance on at least 100 journalists, dissidents and others in several countries.

The call comes as polls cast doubt on political leaders’ ability to manage AI risks amid US midterm elections.

A group of more than 300 scientists from around the world is calling for urgent changes to how artificial intelligence is developed and deployed amid growing concerns about its unpredictable behaviour.

The letter, released on Tuesday and signed by researchers representing universities and research institutes in 32 countries, warned that failures to follow basic cybersecurity practices could lead to damage to critical infrastructure.

Many recent incidents in which AI models escaped secure environments could have been prevented with stronger security systems, the scientists said.

They recommended that organisations developing and testing advanced AI systems capable of carrying out cyberattacks do so in more tightly controlled environments, including “air-gapped” systems that are not connected to the internet.

Growing concerns

The letter comes amid growing concerns about AI’s capabilities and its potential impact on everyday users. On Monday, Anthropic warned that its AI models could soon be capable of creating self-spreading malware that could affect everyday internet-connected devices, including smart TVs, security cameras and smart appliances such as ovens.

The report found that AI systems could identify unfamiliar devices without human intervention. The company, led by Dario Amodei, warned that smaller AI models could be capable of carrying out autonomous attacks by the end of the year.

The malware could also be difficult to contain because it might take days to infect a device and could spread across multiple machines rather than remain concentrated in a single, controlled location.

Taking control of internet-connected devices can have immediate consequences. In France, for example, hackers compromised cooling systems across hundreds of supermarkets, raising temperatures and causing more than $220,000 in damage.

Meanwhile, Axios news organisation reported on Friday that Anthropic, OpenAI and other major AI company executives are privately preparing for the possibility of a catastrophic AI-related incident that could disrupt access to major financial services, the internet and potentially critical infrastructure such as water and power systems. Several industry insiders believe a major incident could occur within the next six months to a year, it said.

The scientists also called for more safeguards, including the creation of an international organisation to establish a set of best practices for AI alignment and containment along with timely reporting of incidents.

One of the signatories, David Lie, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said his concerns began after OpenAI’s AI agents bypassed controls and hacked into servers at the tech company Hugging Face.

“One is that OpenAI, in setting up its test environment, didn’t appreciate how capable its agents were,” Lie said.

“These were the AI agents that they were designing. Second is that the AI agents independently found each other and chose to collaborate on this attack, and third is that they also intentionally tried to deceive and mislead their human creators.”

Political pressures

The letter underscores growing public concern about AI, including in the lead-up to the US congressional midterm elections. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 57 percent of voters said President Donald Trump’s administration was not taking AI risks seriously enough, while 54 percent said the same of Congress.

An AP-NORC poll echoed those findings, with about 80 percent of respondents saying the government should keep AI under human control. Respondents also expressed little confidence in either party’s ability to manage the technology: 39 percent said neither Republicans nor Democrats could be trusted to do a good job of reining it in, while 23 percent expressed greater confidence in Democrats and 21 percent in Republicans.

Hundreds of French supermarkets have suffered unprecedented cyberattacks resulting in tonnes of food perishing and raising fears about the vulnerabilities of food systems to advanced technology.

The attacks, which appeared to target internet-linked refrigeration systems manufactured by a Danish company, raised the temperature of fridges and freezers to as high as 50 degrees Celsius (122F) at more than 500 shops and supermarkets across the country. Supermarkets confirmed the attacks on Monday.

France’s cybersecurity agency has advised companies operating affected freezer models to immediately disconnect them from the internet – or restrict access to them – and to perform software updates.

It is unclear who may have been behind the attacks, but authorities say they have now launched an investigation.

Here’s what we know:

What happened?

Hackers gained internet access to the refrigeration systems and remotely cranked up temperatures in freezers and fridges to 50C during the night when shops were closed. Millions of euros worth of food was spoiled, according to retailers. In some cases, the raised temperatures sparked fires or melted equipment.

French supermarket groups E-Leclerc, Intermarche, Carrefour, Monoprix and Cooperative U were all hit.

At least 300 of Intermarche’s stores and its Netto brand were affected. Cooperative U said more than 100 of its supermarkets were targeted, while Carrefour said 80 supermarkets were affected and Monoprix reported that about 5 percent of its roughly 490 stores were hit.

Officials are still investigating who launched the attack and how it was carried out. French TV channel BFM reported that the attackers appeared to have remotely triggered a forced defrosting option in the refrigeration systems.

The systems targeted are built by Danish manufacturer Danfoss, according to France’s government cybersecurity agency. The refrigeration models attacked included the AK-SM800 and AK-SC355.

Danfoss told the AFP news agency that most of the affected control systems were “legacy” products that had “outdated firmware”. The company said it had previously advised supermarkets to update them.

AFP also reported that officials are liaising with other European countries which may have been affected.

It is unclear exactly how much food has been lost. The attacks come after President Emmanuel Macron ordered last month that the country’s critical infrastructure be protected from Russian “hybrid attacks”.

Have supermarkets been hit by cyberattacks before?

Yes. Attacks like these have been reported in other parts of Europe and in the United States.

In April 2025, British retailer and supermarket chain Marks and Spencer suffered a sophisticated ransomware attack that the company said cost it approximately 300 million pounds ($397m) after it was forced to suspend online and app orders. The attack was orchestrated by a hacker group called Scattered Spider, using ransomware from DragonForce, another criminal group. Ransomware attacks involve using malicious software to hide essential data unless a ransom is paid.

According to UK media, the same hackers also tried to attack Co-op and the iconic Knightsbridge store, Harrods.

Similar reports have also emerged from the US. In June 2025, United Natural Foods, a frozen food company which supplies big supermarket brands such as Whole Foods, said it had discovered a cyberattack that forced it to take its systems offline. The company did not reveal the nature of the attack.

In November last year, Ahold Delhaize USA said it was the victim of a cyberattack that disrupted operations at more than 2,000 stores, including Hannaford, Food Lion and Stop and Shop.

Why target supermarkets?

They are an easy target and the consequences can be widespread.

As food and agricultural systems increasingly digitise, analysts say supermarkets selling perishable foods are increasingly vulnerable to attacks due to the nature of their stocks.

The rising sophistication of cyberattacks now means that common people and local, third-party companies relying on big chains for business are also falling victim as attacks disrupt supply chains, experts say.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, tech and cybersecurity analyst Steven Lachance said smart appliances connected to the internet will always be vulnerable as hackers seize on security lapses to log in to the systems remotely and trigger malicious features.

“It’s the new reality of having these connected equipment,” Lachance said, pointing out that attacks could evolve to target medical or energy systems.

“This should come as a global wake-up call … Throughout society, we have connected infrastructure that is live on the internet, and that can be hacked. It’s a new reality, and we absolutely need national and international measures to prevent those attacks; otherwise, it’s just going to keep happening,” he warned.

Warsaw says the 2 suspects held in Germany will face sabotage charges.

Two Turkish citizens have been detained in Germany over a fire at a Starlink station in central Poland that Warsaw has branded an act of sabotage carried out on Russia’s behalf.

Polish officials announced the arrests on Monday, one month after the fire, which they say was aimed at disrupting internet services, including for Ukraine’s military. The fire, in Masovia in Eastern Poland, engulfed the Starlink station’s power system and backup generator.

Polish Minister of Interior Marcin Kierwinski said the two men would face charges in Poland of carrying out sabotage on the instructions of a foreign intelligence agency. German police made the arrests on behalf of Polish services, according to Deutsche Welle. Polish officials did not say where or when in Germany the men were detained.

“We have no doubt that Russian services are behind this act of sabotage,” Special Services Minister Tomasz Siemoniak said in a news conference. “It is worth adding that Russian services are increasingly turning to individuals linked to the criminal underworld,” he said.

The case is the latest in a string of incidents that officials across the European Union deem to be part of a Russian campaign of sabotage and hybrid attacks aimed at eroding support for Ukraine.

The Russian embassy in Warsaw did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Moscow has previously dismissed similar accusations as baseless and the product of anti-Russian hysteria.

Ukraine’s military relies on tens of thousands of Starlink terminals for battlefield communications and occasional drone operations. Starlink founder Elon Musk activated the service over Ukraine in 2022, days after Russia’s full-scale invasion, following a plea from Kyiv. Poland has said it pays for Ukraine’s Starlink subscription.

Musk has since clashed with Ukrainian officials over his views on the war. This year, he also agreed to switch off thousands of Russian “grey-market” Starlink terminals in Ukraine, causing problems for Russian forces. Ukraine is now seeking to use the terminals for attacks on Russian territory.

TA419 hackers used deceptive tactics, impersonating real figures like a former White House AI official

Chinese hackers have been impersonating artificial intelligence (AI) experts in the United States, including a former government official, according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Proofpoint.

The report, released on Thursday, found that in July, a China-aligned hacking group called TA419 targeted a slate of US policy experts by impersonating prominent figures, including Lynne Edwards Parker, the former principal deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The hackers, who had been operating since April 2025, first sent otherwise harmless-looking emails intended to engage a target, such as requests to join an “AI Policy Advisory Committee”, and, once they responded, the target would be sent to a fake login page designed to steal their credentials.

The targets included policy experts at think tanks, defence contractors, universities and law firms in both the US and Japan.

The report used a technique that creates a fake browser pop-up window inside a legitimate webpage that mimics an authentic-looking sign-in prompt to deceive victims and make it harder for them to realise they are handing over their information to hackers.

Proofpoint did not specifically name the targets hacked, but the Reuters news agency was able to confirm at least one of them as Alex Engler, a former White House official who now heads the Penn Center on Media, Technology, and Democracy.

Engler told Reuters that he got one of the emails, but after checking with industry colleagues, he discovered that he had received the email from an impersonator.

In February, the same group was behind the impersonation of a “prominent” Anthropic employee in efforts to target AI policy experts. The cybersecurity firm behind the report believes that the group will continue to target think tanks and other policy experts and will continue to use the identity of real-world experts to do it.

Parker did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

Australian authorities have raised the alarm after OpenAI-powered models hacked into a government health data system in June, slipping past its digital defences and accessing files without authorisation.

This is the first publicly known case of artificial intelligence (AI) “agents” – AI-powered software systems that can carry out tasks autonomously – breaking into a government website, and the latest of several AI breaches of external systems.

The disclosure comes as top AI firms warn of the risk of humans losing control of AI, calling for its development to slow to a pace that allows it to be safely regulated. Global powers must cooperate to ensure this, they have said.

A research scientist at AI firm Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, went so far as to say he believes there is a greater than 10 percent chance AI could “kill all humans” within a decade.

Addressing the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said there is a risk of AI moving “so fast that people can no longer follow what’s happening or intervene when needed”.

“This would obviously be terrible,” he said. “And we should not train models that we cannot make an extremely strong case that we will be able to keep under human control.”

What do we know about the AI breach in Australia?

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed the breach on Wednesday, saying an OpenAI agent had made its way into the public-facing medical statistics portal of Medicare, the country’s universal health insurance system, on July 18.

When OpenAI accessed the government portal while conducting research on public medical spending, Albanese said the AI agent circumvented “blocks” that should have prevented it from breaking into the portal.

“The AI agent found a way around those blocks – didn’t accept no for an answer,” said Albanese.

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the information the OpenAI agent accessed was “not particularly sensitive” and was later publicly released.

Still, Albanese called the situation “obviously unacceptable” and said Australia had relayed its “extreme concern” to OpenAI, which had failed to notify the government of the breach until September 10.

Albanese also said several other government websites may have been affected by rogue OpenAI agents, though he did not confirm any other breaches.

He added that an inquiry into the breach would look at how Australian security agencies missed it initially and whether criminal charges could be brought against OpenAI.

How has OpenAI responded?

In a statement, OpenAI said it had “identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers” and “took actions we did not intend”.

The company said the incident occurred as its models searched for statistics on medical spending, and that they are not believed to have obtained personal medical records.

OpenAI learned of the incident in August only as it conducted a review of “misaligned model activity”, it added.

Last week, OpenAI said it had put in place a new system to monitor, probe and disclose cases of “misalignment”. That includes instances of AI models that operate “without authorisation, coordinate with other models, or evade oversight”, it said.

Have there been previous AI breaches?

Yes. The Australia data breach is the latest of several instances in which AI agents belonging to OpenAI, Google or Anthropic have accessed external systems without authorisation.

In July, OpenAI reported that two of its most advanced AI models had broken out of a controlled test and hacked another AI company, Hugging Face. OpenAI later said it had detected its AI models communicating with each other and gaining internet access without authorisation months before that hack occurred.

In August, rival Meta AI said its AI model had hacked another company during cybersecurity testing. It said the model made changes to the internal systems of the hacked company, which it did not name, after accessing the public internet because of an error in the setup of its testing environment.

What does this mean for AI safety?

Maurice Chiodo, an Australian mathematician who works at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, told the Reuters news agency the breach appeared to be “a significant escalation in seriousness from similar incidents we have ‌seen ‌in recent months”.

Experts say the Australia data breach highlights the growing dangers AI poses to cybersecurity as well as possible gaps in monitoring and disclosure capabilities.

“The important matter here is not what OpenAI says its agent can do, it is what the agent actually does when it hits a barrier,” Niusha Shafiabady, a professor of computational intelligence and head of the IT discipline at the Australian Catholic University, said in comments published by science news portal Scimex.

“The deeper technical risk is that autonomous AI does not always know when it is wrong, and humans may not be able to see why it made a decision,” added Shafiabady. “Without strong verification and hard boundaries, probabilistic errors can quietly become operational failures.”

Raffaele Fabio Ciriello, a senior lecturer in business information systems at the University of Sydney Business School, said OpenAI’s delay in reporting the breach was “concerning”.

“The incident occurred in June and only came to light months later,” said Ciriello. “Even if OpenAI did not detect the activity immediately, that still points to weaknesses in detection, escalation, and external notification.”

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has revealed a security breach of a government website containing Australians’ health data by an “AI agent”, less than a day after signing a joint appeal for “urgent global guardrails” around artificial intelligence.

Albanese co-signed the “A Call for Control of Frontier AI Models” statement on Tuesday together with 21 signatories including Canada, Spain and Germany, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meeting in New York.

Addressing reporters on Wednesday, Albanese said the agent, developed by OpenAI, accessed public and non-public data on the government’s Medicare portal in June.

Australia’s Labor government is tightening tech regulations with new online safety laws, age bans and proposed digital duty of care frameworks.

Albanese said he had spoken to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to express Canberra’s “extreme concern” about the hack and disappointment that the company took three months to admit the breach.

OpenAI responded in the hours after the news conference, stating that while it was still investigating, there was no evidence patient records were accessed.

The company’s review had identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as its “models attempted to look up answers”, it said.

World leaders respond to AI warnings

The leaders of artificial intelligence companies warned of the risks of unregulated AI development before a 15-member UN Security Council meeting on Wednesday.

One of them, Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian considered one of the ‘Godfathers of AI’ and co-chair of the Independent International Scientific Panel, spoke of the “unprecedented threat” and the “real and imminent” dangers of the technology.

China’s UN ambassador Fu Cong told the meeting that Beijing believed continuous improvement of regulatory frameworks, emergency response and cross-border cooperation on AI was needed.

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the United Kingdom was ready to lead an international effort to establish AI standards.

“We’ve all heard the warnings which we must heed… so we have to rise to this moment,” he said, but added he also wanted the UK to pursue the benefits of AI.

French President Emmanuel Macron warned against allowing the United States and China to dominate decision-making around AI during his speech to the assembly on Wednesday.

US President Donald Trump is at odds with many of his counterparts, comparing the dangers of AI to climate change, which he has called a hoax.

He also proposed rebranding the term AI to SI, or “super intelligence”, during his address to the UNGA on Tuesday, and earlier said he planned to appoint an AI adviser.

In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump said the US was leading the AI race over China, that he was “not going to stifle Growth”, but added ⁠that the US would be careful.

White House science and technology adviser Michael Kratsios echoed Trump in remarks to the UN Security Council on Wednesday.

“You cannot govern technology you do not understand. This body and others like it should focus on sharing best practices to build domestic capacity, not establishing a global regulatory scheme,” he said.

Hacker group ShinyHunters claims to have detailed data on thousands of FBI employees.

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation says it is investigating a breach of its jobs website by a hacking group that claims to have obtained sensitive data on thousands of employees.

“The FBI is aware of a cybercriminal enterprise group claiming a compromise of the fbijobs.gov portal and alleged impact to FBI employee personally identifiable information,” the agency said in a statement on Wednesday.

“While the point of breach is still undetermined — whether a third -party or the FBI’s enterprise — we are actively and aggressively investigating this matter and working closely with those third-party providers that support fbijobs.gov to mitigate any and all risk.”

Several news outlets, including Reuters news agency, reported they had seen parts of the data, claimed to be part of a larger trove between two and three terabytes by ShinyHunters, a hacking group claiming responsibility for the breach. According to Reuters, the data includes granular detail about scores of bureau officials’s job assignments, including sensitive work against Chinese spies, Russian intelligence, drug cartels and more.

ShinyHunters said on Tuesday that it had breached the FBI and stolen data on a huge number of current and former FBI employees. ⁠⁠It said it is holding the data hostage until the bureau rescinds an unflattering statement about the group issued in May. On Wednesday, the group said it was trying to keep the ⁠⁠personnel information from circulating widely in the meantime.

An FBI statement in May characterised ShinyHunters as “threat actors” who often harass or threaten victims, using “their real or exaggerated claims of access to sensitive or personal information to prompt payment from victims”.

The group “may falsely claim to have sensitive or compromising information, including embarrassing photographs or videos of victims, which frequently do not exist,” the FBI said.

The FBI has been a common hacking target.

In March, the FBI disclosed that it was investigating “suspicious activities” on an internal system that contains sensitive information related to surveillance operations and investigations. Also that month, a pro-Iranian hacking group claimed to have hacked an account of FBI Director Kash Patel and posted online what appear to be years-old photographs of him, along with a work resume and other personal documents dating back more than a decade.

The jobs portal was still offline Wednesday afternoon.