The FBI has fired an Accenture contractor over a data breach that exposed personal information of thousands of office employees, Reuters reported on Tuesday, citing two people familiar with the matter.
The FBI has not publicly named the contractor or the organization involved. However, a senior official of the office said Reuters that the review to date indicates a security patch that was not applied by the contractor responsible for the affected system.
“Our review so far has determined that the incident resulted from a security flaw in a platform managed by a third-party organization – after a contractor failed to implement a security patch issued expressly to secure the platform,” FBI cyber chief Brett Leatherman said in a statement.
“As a result, the FBI fired the contractor and took all necessary steps to both mitigate further risks and protect our workforce,” Leatherman added.
According to Reuters’ sources, the system in question is Oracle’s PeopleSoft human resources platform and the external organization is Accenture.
ShinyHunters previously claimed to have exploited PeopleSoft to break into the FBI’s jobs website, and Google recently warned that the threat actor targeted vulnerable PeopleSoft instances to steal data.
Accenture did not respond to questions about the contractor or the alleged patch flaw. Instead, the company said in a statement that it was “proud to support the FBI’s mission and will continue to do so.”
Cybercrime group ShinyHunters announced on September 22 that it had hacked FBI systems. It targeted the agency’s jobs website and allegedly obtained information about all employees, including sensitive information, some of which was leaked to the media.
The attack was allegedly aimed at pressuring the FBI to correct or remove a report the agency released in May warning organizations about ShinyHunters attacks. The hackers claimed the report contained false claims.
Shortly after ShinyHunters announced the breach, law enforcement said they had arrested a suspected leader of the group in the Netherlands on September 15. ShinyHunters was defiant, urging victims to continue negotiating and threatening to reveal their details if they didn’t pay.
The arrest of another alleged ShinyHunters leader, Saif al-Din Khader (aka Rey), was announced on October 3rd. Rey was reportedly arrested in Jordan and has been cooperating with authorities.
At the time of writing, the ShinyHunters website is still online, but a post asking organizations to pay has been removed. The victim’s most recent post is from September 22nd.
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