ShinyHunters is a black-hat criminal hacker and extortion group that is believed to have formed in 2020 and is said to have been involved in a massively significant amount of data breaches. The group often extorts the company they've hacked, if the company does not pay the ransom the stolen information is often sold or leaked on the dark web.[1][2]
Name and alias
The name of the group is believed to be derived from Shiny Pokémon, a mechanic in the Pokémon video game franchise where Pokémon have a rare chance of being encountered in an alternate, "shiny" color scheme; players who actively try to collect such Pokémon through in-game strategies are often referred to as "shiny hunters".[3][4]
Notable data breaches
Mathway: In January 2020, ShinyHunters breached Mathway, stealing roughly 25 million users' data. Mathway is a popular math app for students that helps solve algebraic equations.[5]
Tokopedia: On 2 May 2020 Tokopedia was breached by ShinyHunters, which claimed to have data for 91 million user accounts, revealing users' gender, location, username, full name, email address, phone number, and hashed passwords.[1]
Wishbone: Also in May 2020, ShinyHunters leaked the full user database of Wishbone, which is said to contain personal information such as usernames, emails, phone numbers, city/state/country of residence, and hashed passwords.[6]
Microsoft: In May 2020, ShinyHunters also claimed to have stolen over 500 GB of Microsoft source code from the company's private GitHub account. The group published around 1GB of data from the hacked GitHub account to a hacking forum. Some cybersecurity experts doubted the claims until analyzing the code; upon analysis, ShinyHunters' claims were no longer in question. Microsoft told Wired in a statement that they are aware of the breach. Microsoft later secured their GitHub account, which was confirmed by ShinyHunters as they reported being unable to access any repositories.[7][8][9]
Wattpad: In July 2020, ShinyHunters gained access to the Wattpad database containing 270 million user records. Information leaked included usernames, real names, hashed passwords, email addresses, geographic location, gender, and date of birth.[10][11][12]
Pluto TV: In November 2020, it was reported that ShinyHunters gained access to the personal data of 3.2 million Pluto TV users. The hacked data included users' display names, email addresses, IP addresses, hashed passwords and dates of birth.[13][14]
Animal Jam: It was also reported in November 2020 that ShinyHunters was behind the hack of Animal Jam, leading to the exposure of 46 million accounts.[15][16]
Mashable: In November 2020, ShinyHunters leaked 5.22GB worth of the Mashable database on a prominent hacker forum.[17]
AT&T Wireless: In 2021, ShinyHunters began selling information on 70 million AT&T wireless subscribers, which contained users' phone numbers, personal information and social security numbers. AT&T acknowledged the data breach in 2024.[18][19][20]
Pixlr: In January 2021, ShinyHunters leaked 1.9 million user records from Pixlr.[21]
Nitro PDF: In January 2021, a hacker claiming to be a part of ShinyHunters leaked the full database of Nitro PDF — which contains 77 million user records — on a hacker forum for free.[22]
Bonobos: Also in January 2021 it was reported that ShinyHunters leaked the full Bonobos backup cloud database to a hacker forum. The database is said to contain the address, phone numbers, and order details for 7 million customers; general account information for another 1.8 million registered customers; and 3.5 million partial credit card records and hashed passwords.[23]
Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail: In December 2021, Indian retailer Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail was breached and ransomed. The ransom demand was allegedly rejected and data containing 5.4 million unique email addresses were subsequently dumped publicly on a popular hacking forum the next month. The data contained extensive personal customer information including names, phone numbers, physical addresses, birth dates, order histories and passwords stored as MD5 hashes[24]
AT&T Wireless (2): In April 2024, the ShinyHunters cybercriminal group hacked AT&T Wireless and stole data on over 110 million customers. In May, AT&T paid a $370,000 ransom to one of the group's members to delete the data.[25]
Santander: On May 30, 2024, Santander was breached by ShinyHunters, which resulted in all Santander staff and '30 million' customers in Spain, Chile and Uruguay compromised.[26]
Ticketmaster: The ShinyHunters cybercriminal group have claimed responsibility for breaching Ticketmaster via the Snowflake campaign.[27]
PowerSchool: In December 2024, education-software vendor PowerSchool was breached; the attacker demanded $2.85 million and the company paid a ransom to prevent release of stolen student/teacher data.[28][29]. In early May 2025, new extortion emails began hitting individual school districts despite the payment, with outlets reporting ongoing attempts to leverage the same stolen data. One message shared with DataBreaches.net opened, "Hello, we are ShinyHunters," demanding payment from North Carolina authorities, though the publication cautioned it could not authenticate the sender's identity. BleepingComputer likewise reported that someone claiming to be ShinyHunters was re-extorting districts, while a person identifying as the group's leader told the outlet the culprit was an affiliate impersonating them.[30]
Legal Aid Agency (U.K. Ministry of Justice): The Ministry of Justice disclosed on 22 May 2025 (updated 4 September 2025) that the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) suffered a cyber incident affecting applicants who used its digital service from 2007 until systems were taken offline on 16 May 2025; the MoJ has not named a culprit and says investigations are ongoing.[31]In August 2025, multiple outlets reported that a group using the ShinyHunters name posted on Telegram (Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters[32][33]) claiming responsibility and threatening to leak LAA data unless a member was freed; The Times and TheLaw Society Gazette covered the claim while noting authorities had not verified the posts and that the deadline passed without a leak.[34][35][36][37]
LVMH (Louis Vuitton, Dior, Tiffany & Co.): In mid-2025, luxury conglomerate LVMH confirmed that several of its brands – including Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Tiffany & Co. – experienced unauthorized access to a customer information database managed by a third-party platform.[38] While each subsidiary disclosed limited details (Tiffany & Co.'s Korean unit noted a "vendor platform" was breached), investigators later tied these incidents to the ShinyHunters Salesforce data-theft campaign.[39] The threat actors privately extorted the firms via email (using the ShinyHunters name) and were ultimately identified as part of the UNC6040/UNC6240 clusters described by Google.[40]
Google: On June 4, 2025, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) reported on UNC6040, a cluster of voice-phishing campaigns targeting organizations' Salesforce instances. The attackers used modified versions of Data Loader to export Salesforce data and subsequently extort the victims. GTIG attributed the activity to ShinyHunters.[41] According to DataBreaches.net, ShinyHunters have merged with Scattered Spider.[42] On August 5, 2025, Google confirmed that a corporate Salesforce instance containing contact information and notes for small and medium-sized businesses had been compromised by UNC6040/ShinyHunters activity.[43]
Qantas: In July 2025, Australian airline Qantas suffered a cyberattack that exposed data of approximately 5.7 million customers.[44] Initially attributed to Scattered Spider by multiple professional security researchers and journalists. [45] Later confirmed to be the work of the ShinyHunters cybercriminal group.[46] According to DataBreaches.net and many others journalists/security researchers, ShinyHunters have merged with Scattered Spider.[47]
Jaguar Land Rover: On September 2, 2025, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) disclosed a cyber incident and proactively shut down systems, causing severe disruption to production and retail operations. In the days that followed, outlets reported that a ShinyHunters/Scattered Spider–aligned collective claimed responsibility; JLR said there was no evidence of customer data theft at that time and notified the UK ICO.[48][49][50][51]
In June 4, 2025, ShinyHunters was tied to a widespread data-theft campaign targeting Salesforce cloud customers, which Google’s Threat Intelligence team tracked as UNC6040.[54] The cybercriminal group working in conjunction with Scattered Spider[55] (now believed to be the same group) impersonated IT support staff and used voice phishing (vishing) calls to trick employees into installing a malicious version of Salesforce's Data Loader tool, allowing them to access and extract sensitive customer data. Following the successful intrusions, Google's Threat Intelligence team notes the victims of these intrusions receive an extortion or ransom email from the ShinyHunters cybercriminal group, which is also tracked as UNC6240.[56]
In August 28, 2025, a campaign tracked by Google Threat Intelligence (formerly Mandiant) as UNC6395 used OAuth/refresh tokens stolen from Salesloft's Drift integration to access numerous Salesforce customer orgs between August 8–18, 2025, systematically exporting CRM data and hunting for credentials (e.g., AWS access keys, passwords, Snowflake tokens).[58] Google told reporters it was aware of over 700 potentially impacted organizations. Public disclosures tied to this campaign include Cloudflare, Workiva, Zscaler, Tenable, CyberArk, Elastic, BeyondTrust, Proofpoint, JFrog, Rubrik, Cato Networks, and Palo Alto Networks, each confirming unauthorized access to data in their Salesforce environments following the Salesloft/Drift compromise.[59]The ShinyHunters cybercriminal group claimed responsibility to the press.
On September 17, 2025, BleepingComputer was able to confirm ShinyHunters was behind the UNC6395 campaign, the biggest SaaS compromise in history.[60] ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer that the threat actors used the TruffleHog security tool to scan the source code for secrets, which resulted in the finding of OAuth tokens for the Salesloft Drift and the Drift Email platforms. Using these stolen Drift OAuth tokens, ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer that the threat actors stole approximately 1.5 billion data records for 760 companies from the "Account", "Contact", "Case", "Opportunity", and "User" Salesforce object tables.
Other data breaches
The following are other hacks that have been credited to or allegedly done by ShinyHunters. The estimated impacts of user records affected are also given, if possible.[61][62][63]
ShinyHunters group is under investigation by the FBI, the Indonesian police, and the Indian police for the Tokopedia breach. Tokopedia's CEO and founder also confirmed this claim via a statement on Twitter.[93][94]
Minted company reported the group's hack to US federal law enforcement authorities; the investigation is underway.[95]
Administrative documents from California reveal how ShinyHunters' hack has led to Mammoth Media, the creator of the app Wishbone, getting hit with a class-action lawsuit.[96]
Animal Jam stated that they are preparing to report ShinyHunters to the FBI Cyber Task Force and notify all affected emails. They have also created a 'Data Breach Alert' on their site to answer questions related to the breach.[97]
BigBasket filed a First Information Report (FIR) on November 6, 2020, to the Bengaluru Police to investigate the incident.[98]
Dave also initiated an investigation against the group for the company's security breach. The investigation is ongoing and the company is coordinating with local law enforcement and the FBI.[99]
Wattpad stated that they reported the incident to law enforcement and engaged third-party security experts to assist them in an investigation.[100]
Following the ransomware attack on Jaguar and Land Rover, which M&S hackers claimed responsibility for as first reported by the Telegraph[101], also linked to the groups Scattered Spider and ShinyHunters, the National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ, is understood to be monitoring the situation.
Arrests
In May 2022, Sébastien Raoult, a French programmer suspected of belonging to the group, was arrested in Morocco and extradited to the United States. He faced 20 to 116 years in prison.[102][103]
In January 2024 Raoult was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to return five million dollars.[104] Twelve months of the sentence are for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and the remainder for aggravated identity theft.[104] He will face 36 months of supervised release afterwards.[104] Raoult had worked for the group for more than two years according to the US Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington, but was not a major player within the group.[104]
In May–June 2025, U.S. prosecutors in the District of Massachusetts charged Matthew D. Lane, a 19-year-old Massachusetts student, with hacking and extorting an education-technology provider widely reported to be PowerSchool; prosecutors said Lane used stolen contractor credentials to access the company's network in 2024, exfiltrate data on tens of millions of students and teachers, and demand a $2.85 million bitcoin ransom. Lane agreed to plead guilty on May 20, 2025, and entered a guilty plea on June 6, 2025.[105][106] Although some re-extortion emails sent to North Carolina school authorities in early May 2025 opened with "Hello, we are ShinyHunters".[107]
On June 25, 2025, French authorities announced that four members of the ShinyHunters cybercriminal group were arrested in multiple French regions for cybercrime activities. The coordinated global law enforcement effort targeting the 'ShinyHunters', 'Hollow', 'Noct', and 'Depressed' personas.[108] It is believed that the French have arrested an affiliate of ShinyHunters cybercriminal group and not the ring leader of the ShinyHunters cybercriminal group as they are still wreaking havoc in the cybersecurity world. [109][110]