Denis Calderone, CTO, Suzu Labs
“ShinyHunters has spent the last week picking fights. On Friday they took over Cl0p’s leak site and put up a ’seized by ShinyHunters’ banner, and by Tuesday the same banner was on the FBI’s jobs portal. Both were framed as payback, one for threats from a rival gang and one for an FBI advisory that told victims not to pay them. The FBI hasn’t confirmed anything yet, but if this holds up, it doesn’t look like the ShinyHunters we’ve been seeing all year. Their model has always been breach, extort, then settle or leak, and that only works when the victim can pay. The FBI isn’t going to pay, and it isn’t going to pull an advisory because a criminal group demanded it. Not sure what’s going to happen in a week, but I seriously doubt the FBI will act on this threat.”
“They also say this isn’t financially motivated, but I’d take that with a grain of salt. I have a hard time believing terabytes of FBI personnel data just sit on a shelf. Foreign intelligence services would love to have it, and having the FBI on their resume makes every future extortion demand more believable, and if the PeopleSoft zero-day is real, the exploit may be worth more than the data. Meanwhile, agents and their spouses could have their home addresses posted publicly within a week if this threat is followed through.”
“That zero-day is where everyone else should focus, since ShinyHunters says they plan to use it more broadly. If you run PeopleSoft, don’t wait for a patch. Get it off the public internet wherever you can, put what has to stay public behind a WAF, and make sure admin components like the /PSEMHUB/ path in their screenshot aren’t reachable from outside. Hunt for the June indicators and for SSH attempts against the psoft and oracle accounts. Then ask yourself what your applicant portal can reach. At the FBI, a website built for strangers to upload resumes allegedly led straight into GovCloud.”
“Limiting your blast radius is the best precautionary play here.”
