FBI Director Kash Patel’s Emails, Photos Hacked by Iran-Linked Group
By Al Jazeera. A group of Iran-linked hackers have said that they successfully gained access to the personal emails of Kash Patel, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), sharing photographs and documents from the United States official online.
The Handala Hack Team said on Friday that Patel would “will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims”.
The news outlets Reuters and CNN confirmed the breach, citing unnamed security officials and people familiar with the matter. The FBI and Department of Justice have yet to comment on the incident.
The hacking appears to have released some documents more than a decade old. Some of the emails show Patel’s travel and business correspondence. Others include photos of Patel beside an antique sports convertible, posing with a cigar in his mouth and standing in front of a mirror with a bottle of rum.
Patel is the ninth director of the FBI, and he began his tenure in 2025. But his leadership has been marked by controversy, with critics accusing him of misusing the federal law enforcement agency for personal travel and to carry out President Donald Trump’s priorities. (Read more from “FBI director Kash Patel’s emails, photos hacked by Iran-linked group” HERE)
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Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director’s personal email, publish photos and documents
By Reuters. Iran-linked hackers have broken into FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email inbox, publishing photographs of the director and other documents to the internet, the hackers and the bureau said on Friday. . .
Alongside the photographs of Patel, the hackers published a sample of more than 300 emails, which appear to show a mix of personal and work correspondence dating between 2010 and 2019.
Reuters was not able to independently authenticate the Patel messages, but the personal Gmail address that Handala claims to have broken into matches the address linked to Patel in previous data breaches preserved by the dark web intelligence firm District 4 Labs. Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab -owned Google, which runs Gmail, did not respond to a request for comment. . .
Iran-linked hackers – who initially kept a low profile after the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes against the Islamic Republic last month – have increasingly boasted of their cyber operations as the conflict drags on.
In addition to the hack against Stryker, Handala on Thursday claimed to have published the personal data of dozens of defense company Lockheed Martin employees stationed in the Middle East. In a statement, Lockheed Martin (LMT.N), opens new tab said it was aware of the reports and had policies and procedures in place “to mitigate cyber threats to our business.” (Read more from “Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director’s personal email, publish photos and documents” HERE)
