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:
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
I think we will tolerate it and invest in making official actions reversible, to guard against rogue agents and hackers. There's too much money in agentic commerce.
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.
In the morning, I get the notification on my phone through the centralized monitoring company, "Swipe", which also manages my cryptosig for a fee on every transaction. I freak out and report the transactions as fraud and they give the money back while they investigate.
Swipe comps the $3000 advance on my loan the scammer managed to withdraw, and I get off scott free, changing nothing about my behaviour.
If I was still liable for someone stealing my identity like in 2026, I might actually restrict my cryptosig. I'd insist on negotiating everything myself and authorizing things. That sucks for "Swipe"! They don't get a commission when I use my credit card directly or do an in-person deal.
I don't want to do that. When I was 18, I got swindled by a human salesperson into a $1400/month 27% APR financing on a muscle car back when the US Army gave out signing bonuses to human soldiers. I didn't have anyone to tell me I was an idiot.
When I let AI own the budget, it realized I rarely drive more than 500 miles a month. It leased me a mostly depreciated muscle car for $500/month.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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 :-)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Most people have a line of credit far larger than their actual use. With a debit card that's coming right out of your account, which means your mortgage, if it comes in before you notice the issue, is going to then fail.
This is also partially that people don't put critical bills on their credit card typically. And even if your credit card does get maxed out, you typically would have a second credit card handy. But those credit card payments have to come out of your bank account and so you're risking that you intend to pay your credit card you said Set whatever it is to send the money in but there's no money in your account And so it doesn't get paid and now you have late fees on other accounts
If your debit card is going to a different bank than what you normally pay all your bills out of, this is not a worry. That is not how most people I know handle their banking though, which is why it is a real problem to worry about.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.”
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
AFAICT in Dec 2024 the reasoning was that they had a paywall.
I don't know what percentage of their articles were behind one then, or how that might've changed between then and 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 the submissions, and then people would choose whether to upvote the more-accessible source, whether the hard-to-read stuff was still important enough to comment on, 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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 $396m HR government contract this summer. Who wouldn’t want to supply the most secure software product to manage some of the most sensitive data within the agency, if not the Oracle Moscow branch.
> Separately, the cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed to have exfiltrated student, financial-aid, immigration, health, and administrative records from PeopleSoft instances at more than 100 organizations, predominantly universities. The group stated it had previously targeted an *FBI PeopleSoft server* before pivoting to educational institutions already compromised in earlier campaigns. Oracle has not publicly confirmed the scope or remediation status of these incidents.
So the FBI knew, and had it coming, and if stuff like this happens, THE HEAD needs to roll. And all of his buddies in IT should permanently get to spend their time outside the government at the seafood buffet at Ka$hs favorite gentleman’s club as well.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
I think we will tolerate it and invest in making official actions reversible, to guard against rogue agents and hackers. There's too much money in agentic commerce.
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.
In the morning, I get the notification on my phone through the centralized monitoring company, "Swipe", which also manages my cryptosig for a fee on every transaction. I freak out and report the transactions as fraud and they give the money back while they investigate.
Swipe comps the $3000 advance on my loan the scammer managed to withdraw, and I get off scott free, changing nothing about my behaviour.
If I was still liable for someone stealing my identity like in 2026, I might actually restrict my cryptosig. I'd insist on negotiating everything myself and authorizing things. That sucks for "Swipe"! They don't get a commission when I use my credit card directly or do an in-person deal.
I don't want to do that. When I was 18, I got swindled by a human salesperson into a $1400/month 27% APR financing on a muscle car back when the US Army gave out signing bonuses to human soldiers. I didn't have anyone to tell me I was an idiot.
When I let AI own the budget, it realized I rarely drive more than 500 miles a month. It leased me a mostly depreciated muscle car for $500/month.
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.
> 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.
>The calculus has certainly changed.
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.
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.
> 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
So say we all.
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.
That's actually funny. I was going to add Gipsy Danger being analog, but it's a totally different scenario.
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 :-)
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.
> 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
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.
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.
If there were companies that never got hacked, how would you notice?
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.
That what services that offer disposable and merchant-locked virtual cards are for. I have had good experiences with Privacy.com and Revolut.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
What happens with credit card? Is your line of credit reduced until it gets reversed?
Most people have a line of credit far larger than their actual use. With a debit card that's coming right out of your account, which means your mortgage, if it comes in before you notice the issue, is going to then fail.
This is also partially that people don't put critical bills on their credit card typically. And even if your credit card does get maxed out, you typically would have a second credit card handy. But those credit card payments have to come out of your bank account and so you're risking that you intend to pay your credit card you said Set whatever it is to send the money in but there's no money in your account And so it doesn't get paid and now you have late fees on other accounts
If your debit card is going to a different bank than what you normally pay all your bills out of, this is not a worry. That is not how most people I know handle their banking though, which is why it is a real problem to worry about.
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.
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
The parent post just says "I don't want to put my credit card info in their crappy parking app".
"I'm only talking about long-term storage" is itself a goalpost move!
For example, you have to trust the QR code takes you to the real app: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyjqg578e1o
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
Google seems capable
Oh yes, our one savior, Google
Yes that's why I run GrapheneOS, Google is very capable of inserting its own backdoors
This can’t be true. There’s no way the lowest bid contractor would build something with security gaps.
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.
Mythos can do much worse
Mythos can hack 200 million government employees
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.
banks still largely do... if they lose this fight, society has a problem
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…
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
There's also a scene where they do network the computers and are hacked nearly instantly.
I loved the writers giving every firewall its own LED indicator, so we knew exactly how far the toasters had got.
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.
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.
> 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 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
this is the way
So say we all
Well that's a big one.
Perhaps firing expertise and hiring incompetents wasn't a good idea.
I always assumed DOGE + Ka$h would create an impenetrable fortress of strength; a beacon on the hill of brilliance and security.
I thank you for your attention to this matter
If you use Trump Coins to reflect the Evil Eye away from you, nothing bad can happen to you.
It can only good happen.
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.
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?
Probably just one of the new recruits clicking on a link while viewing beastiality
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> Perhaps firing expertise
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?
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.
At this point if Oracle's reputation has any more negative impact it is liable to roll over and suddenly have an amazing reputation.
> have a negative impact upon Oracle's reputation
Do they have any positive reputation left, or is it just more negative from the previous negative position?
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.
So. The beatings will continue until morale/profitability improves?
Lets hope the Epstein files see the light of day, thanks to AI...
404 Media is doing a much better job at breaking major stories than mainstream media. Nice.
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 one then, or how that might've changed between then and 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 the submissions, and then people would choose whether to upvote the more-accessible source, whether the hard-to-read stuff was still important enough to comment on, etc.
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...
I mean ... that's kind of literally their name ... (not found media)
Looks like it was an Oracle PeopleSoft 0-day so I imagine there are a lot more systems vulnerable.
And, was this system exposed to internet without any VPN? Out was it also compromised?
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
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.
Random member of the public: THEY HACKED THE FBI111!11!!
Anyone with minimal understanding of technology: Oh, PeopleSoft.
> 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.
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.
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?
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
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?
the columns mason
Remember when in movies getting access to this was THE THREAT?
Fun times.
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.
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 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
they have been on an absolute roll for quite awhile now.
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
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.
That feels like publicly announcing that you want to be in a lot of trouble.
Hasn't that db been pwned previously?
Trinity cracked the IRS dBase, not the FBI one.
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.
DOGE got the IRS database, which got released to the Russians.
Remember how the original Mission Impossible movie (1996) was about the bad guys getting the NOC list? This feels somehow even worse than that.
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...
"they hacked the Gibson man"
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.
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?
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.
Again?
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 $396m HR government contract this summer. Who wouldn’t want to supply the most secure software product to manage some of the most sensitive data within the agency, if not the Oracle Moscow branch.
https://mesoclever.com/2026/06/11/oracle-wins-396m-hr-contra...
They even mentioned in the above June article:
> Separately, the cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed to have exfiltrated student, financial-aid, immigration, health, and administrative records from PeopleSoft instances at more than 100 organizations, predominantly universities. The group stated it had previously targeted an *FBI PeopleSoft server* before pivoting to educational institutions already compromised in earlier campaigns. Oracle has not publicly confirmed the scope or remediation status of these incidents.
So the FBI knew, and had it coming, and if stuff like this happens, THE HEAD needs to roll. And all of his buddies in IT should permanently get to spend their time outside the government at the seafood buffet at Ka$hs favorite gentleman’s club as well.
Fookin Big Idiots.
So they're getting access to a year's worth of free credit reporting for the inconvenience?
...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.
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.
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.
Resume like that would set you up right for a cybersecurity career
And yet its had no effect. If anything this group has accelerated their activities, as evinced by this FBI hack.
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.