Hackers steal over 380 GB of top-secret documents from U.S. Marshals Service

The hacking group Hunters International claims to have stolen 386 GB of confidential and top-secret information from the United States Marshals Service.

The ransomware operation has posted several screenshots on its data leak site of documents containing sensitive data that was allegedly exfiltrated from the U.S. Marshals Service not too long ago.

According to threat monitoring firm HackManac, the hacking group stole 327,268 files, including gang files, confidential and top-secret documents, FBI documents, old and current cases, operations data, electronic surveillance, and more.

Hunters International demands an unknown amount of ransom from the federal law enforcement agency. The deadline for the ransom payment is set to Friday August 30. If the U.S. Marshals Service doesn’t come up with the money by then, the hackers threaten to publish the exfiltrated data.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service told Gizmodo he couldn’t confirm the data breach’s authenticity. He did corroborate that the agency was looking into the claims made by Hunters International.

“The United States Marshals Service has evaluated the materials posted by individuals on the dark web, which do not appear to derive from any new or undisclosed incident,” Brady McCarron, a spokesperson for the Marshals Service, tells Recorded Future News.

If the data breach is genuine, this would be the second major security breach of the U.S. Marshals Service in two years. In February 2023, the agency also became a victim of a ransomware attack, crippling some of its IT computer systems for months.

Security experts believe that Hunters International is the successor of the Hive ransomware operation, which was taken offline in January 2023 by law enforcement agencies from Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and ten other countries.

In a statement, Hunters International declared to be an independent ransomware operation rather than a rebranded iteration of Hive. As of this writing, the hacking group has successfully compromised victims in 29 countries and extorted them for millions and millions of dollars.

“It is clear that for Hunters, data is money and the group’s main focus is maximizing profits rather than any political motivation. In this regard, the more sensitive the stolen data, the greater the chances of receiving a large payment,” Sofia Scozzari, CEO of HackManac, says in a response to Gizmodo.