By Jana Winter and AJ Vicens
WASHINGTON, March 27 (Reuters) - Iran-linked hackers on Friday claimed they had accessed FBI Director Kash Patel's personal email inbox, publishing photographs of the director and other documents to the internet.
On their website, the hacker group Handala Hack Team said Patel "will now find his name among the list of successfully hacked victims." The hackers published a series of personal photographs of Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique convertible, and making a face while taking a picture of himself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum.
A Justice Department official confirmed that Patel's email had been breached and said the material published online appeared authentic. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The hackers did not immediately respond to messages.
Handala, which calls itself a group of pro-Palestinian vigilante hackers, is considered by Western researchers to be one of several personas used by Iranian government cyberintelligence units. Handala recently claimed the hack of Michigan-based medical devices and services provider Stryker on March 11, claiming to have deleted a massive trove of company data.
Reuters was not able to independently authenticate the Patel emails, 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-owned Google, which runs Gmail, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A sample of the material uploaded by the hackers and reviewed by Reuters appears to show a mix of personal and work correspondence dating between 2010 and 2019.
(Reporting by Raphael Satter, editing by Deepa Babington)
