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#data#oracle#fbi#government#where#security#got#peoplesoft#thing#computer

Discussion (88 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jacobgold33 minutes ago
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...

coldpie11 minutes ago
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.

titzer16 minutes ago
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.
lotsofpulp13 minutes ago
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.

ceejayoz11 minutes ago
> What info can be gleaned from that?

The card number?

Taek25 minutes ago
Google seems capable
ChosenEnd14 minutes ago
Mythos can hack 200 million government employees
simur14 minutes ago
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.
kakacik4 minutes ago
banks still largely do... if they lose this fight, society has a problem
tdhz7722 minutes ago
Mythos can do much worse
reactordevabout 1 hour ago
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…
ishouldstayaway17 minutes ago
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.

2830428340923414 minutes ago
"What do you hear, Starbuck?"
dylan6041 minute ago
There's also a scene where they do network the computers and are hacked nearly instantly.
jshier9 minutes ago
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.
gchamonlive25 minutes ago
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
mikeyinternews37 minutes ago
this is the way
mjhagen22 minutes ago
So say we all
corvadabout 1 hour ago
Looks like it was an Oracle PeopleSoft 0-day so I imagine there are a lot more systems vulnerable.
ctkhn29 minutes ago
I wonder if that was really a 0-day or an intentional backdoor?
paimapi16 minutes ago
it's Oracle, 99% chance it's a 0-day lol
tencentshillabout 2 hours ago
Well that's a big one.

Perhaps firing expertise and hiring incompetents wasn't a good idea.

baggachipzabout 1 hour ago
I always assumed DOGE + Ka$h would create an impenetrable fortress of strength; a beacon on the hill of brilliance and security.
classified24 minutes ago
If you use Trump Coins to reflect the Evil Eye away from you, nothing bad can happen to you.
debo_11 minutes ago
It can only good happen.
rayinerabout 1 hour ago
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.
consumer45126 minutes ago
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?
freejazz31 minutes ago
Probably just one of the new recruits clicking on a link while viewing beastiality
nateb2022about 1 hour ago
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.
lenerdenatorabout 1 hour ago
That's assuming that the result of this will be to switch away from PeopleSoft.
Zigurd40 minutes ago
Not even the FBI has hostage negotiators good enough to get you out of an Oracle contract.
nateb2022about 1 hour ago
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.

mc32about 1 hour ago
Do you think this is a consequence of the seemingly quarterly RIFs at Oracle? Is it that offshoring wasn’t such a good idea?
lenerdenatorabout 1 hour ago
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.

jmclnx26 minutes ago
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.

Betelbuddyabout 1 hour ago
Lets hope the Epstein files see the light of day, thanks to AI...
smalltorchabout 3 hours ago
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?

Joel_Mckayabout 1 hour ago
In general, most governments have standard operational policies that mitigate such issues (ISO 15408.) =3
dvhabout 1 hour ago
ISO and ICC start with the same letter, just saying...
Joel_Mckay43 minutes ago
The International Cricket Council does have very strict rules. lol =3
lenerdenatorabout 1 hour ago
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.

smalltorch39 minutes ago
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.

whynotmaybe24 minutes ago
> data totalled between two and three terabytes.

That's lot of data for a list of employees.

AraneaDev13 minutes ago
I was gonna say. What else did they get, whole dossiers with photos etc?
steveBK12332 minutes ago
Claiming they got all employee & spouse data.

Wondering about pets..

S-E-P15 minutes ago
Hasn't that db been pwned previously?
alexjplant5 minutes ago
[delayed]
corvadabout 1 hour ago
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.
john_strinlaiabout 1 hour ago
they have been on an absolute roll for quite awhile now.
KronisLV40 minutes ago
That feels like publicly announcing that you want to be in a lot of trouble.
Apocryphon21 minutes ago
Remember how the original Mission Impossible movie (1996) was about the bad guys getting the NOC list? This feels somehow even worse than that.
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bearjaws28 minutes ago
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...

Jamesbeam4 minutes ago
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.

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.

levocardia41 minutes ago
So, what are the odds this was done with an open-weight LLM?
DaSHacka6 minutes ago
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.

Ancapistani28 minutes ago
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.

kelseyfrogabout 2 hours ago
So they're getting access to a year's worth of free credit reporting for the inconvenience?
dgellowabout 3 hours ago
Im sorry given how bad of a situation that is, but it would be so ironic if they used Claude or codex for this
ben_wabout 1 hour ago
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.

jgalt21238 minutes ago
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?
TZubiriabout 1 hour ago
Is their name a reference to pokemon? Or to the meme that the FBI/CIA glows through the screen?
bitwizeabout 1 hour ago
You're thinking of "glowie", "shiny" is def a Pokémon thing.
mech42239 minutes ago
also an mmo thing - hunting for collectibles in game
yepyoukno29 minutes ago
“Glowie” is a white supremacist slur for “Jew” or “fed” (they think the Feds are “a bunch of Jews”.)

They say glowie because they see Jews are n*s who are white. They “glow” (they’re not dark.)

It’s crazy hearing main stream mention this slur slang without awareness of its root or meaning.

phainopepla215 minutes ago
I think you have the etymology wrong, although there was (schizophrenic) racism involved in the coining of the term. The "glow" part doesn't come from the fact that they're white (or not dark), it comes from Terry Davis saying that "CIA n*'s glow in the dark" (i.e. are obviously spotted and can't hide their identities).
clintabout 1 hour ago
They've been on an streak for over 6 years now, check out their wikipedia page.
iAMkenoughabout 1 hour ago
In the same week the head of the FBI went on national TV to claim credit for increasing the bureau's use of AI by 605%, whatever that's supposed to mean.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

giancarlostoroabout 1 hour ago
It means when the FBI builds a case against you make sure your lawyer hires a competent forensic expert. I've seen and heard "expert" testimonies in some court cases that make me angry. There's people using tools that digitally "enhance" small images, and that gets presented as evidence in court. It bewilders me how adding pixels to an image is evidence.
Simulacraabout 1 hour ago
Again?
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applfanboysbgonabout 1 hour ago
Wow, that is bold. I wonder if they'll get away with it because incompetent leadership has decimated the US's capabilities? This certainly doesn't bode well for the US's odds against its nation-state rivals.
giancarlostoroabout 1 hour ago
...and this is how the FBI makes you a higher priority target, and you wind up caught.
clintabout 1 hour ago
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.
woko15 minutes ago
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.
phendrenad234 minutes ago
Imagine the FBI's relief when the hackers only got a list of their employees, not the UFO files.
htrpabout 2 hours ago
TLDR. A Peoplesoft (Oracle HR) instance was compromised which allowed movement into GovCloud (AWS)
ok123456about 1 hour ago
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.

0xbadcafebeeabout 1 hour ago
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).

lenerdenatorabout 1 hour ago
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.

jimbob45about 1 hour ago
I’m skeptical that multiple terabytes of data were exfiltrated quietly. I’m struggling to see this as anything other than a bluff.
iAMkenough40 minutes ago
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.