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.

The hacking group, which describes itself as pro-Palestinian hacking vigilantes, also claimed credit for a recent cyberattack on the medical device company Stryker.

The group, which Western researchers have said is linked to Iranian cyberintelligence, said that the attack was in retaliation for the US-Israeli strike on a children’s school in Minab in southern Iran that killed more than 170 people, most of them schoolgirls.

The group said at the time that the operation marked “the beginning of a new chapter in cyber warfare”. Iran has threatened to step up attacks on Western economic interests as a form of pressure amid the US-Israel war against the country. (Al Jazeera)

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