Summary
Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested a 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by the prolific hacker group ShinyHunters. In the days immediately following the suspect’s arrest, remaining ShinyHunters members dramatically escalated their attacks, stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the Russian ransomware group Cl0p.
According to three sources familiar with the matter, the Dutch man arrested by authorities this month is Pepijn van der Stap, a convicted cybercriminal from Almere and Lelystad in the Netherlands. Van der Stap was previously convicted in 2023 in connection with a string of data thefts and extortions that prosecutors said earned between €1.5 million and €2.7 million.
At his trial in late 2023, van der Stap admitted that he lived a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde existence, secretly using the hacker handle “Umbreon” to extort victims and post their data on English language hacking communities like the now-defunct RaidForums and Breached. By day, however, van der Stap was working as a software engineer at the Amsterdam-based cybersecurity startup Hadrian, while volunteering at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD), a nonprofit security research group.
Pepijn van der Stap’s alter ego “Umbreon” selling a database on RaidForums, offering information on 2.3 million people from The Netherlands in September 2021. This user’s avatar is a depiction of the Pokemon character Umbreon. Image: KELA.
Van der Stap confessed to his data theft and extortion activity, and was sentenced to four years in prison (one of which was suspended). During his trial, van der Stap opted to remain in custody for a time rather than at home, saying he could not find better treatment on the outside for his ongoing psychological issues, which he claimed included PTSD related to childhood trauma. He was released from prison in December 2025.
In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity on September 9, 2026, Van der Stap cast himself as a reformed hacker who was trying to turn his life around and make a positive contribution to society. Van der Stap is currently employed as offensive security lead at the Dutch company Neo Security, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Van der Stap said he was still dealing with civil lawsuits and restitution related to his previous cybercrime victims, and that he was trying his best to make amends. But not long after that interview, the Dutch hacker abruptly stopped replying to messages. Efforts by others close to him also repeatedly failed to elicit a response for the past two weeks.
The LinkedIn profile for Pepijn van der Stap.
According to two sources with knowledge of the matter, Van der Stap was arrested by Dutch authorities on or around September 16, and has been held in custody for questioning since. One source said a colleague of theirs personally witnessed Dutch authorities carting items out of Van der Stap’s residence.
Authorities in the Netherlands have been asking the public for help in identifying the voice in a recorded telephone call from February 2026 in which a native Dutch-speaking ShinyHunters member social engineered their way into Odido, the nation’s largest mobile telecommunications provider. In that intrusion, ShinyHunters tricked an Odido employee into logging in at a spoofed website, and then used that access to steal data on more than 6.2 million Dutch people.
Responding to Dutch news media, ShinyHunters confirmed that the suspect in the audio clip is indeed a member of the hacker collective.
“Our team member has our full support – emotionally, mentally, and financially,” the hackers said. “Everything has been arranged, including a criminal defense lawyer. We do not look down on our staff and members; we take excellent care of them,” reads a statement ShinyHunters shared with NL Times. It remains unclear if the Dutch police have matched the Odido caller to a confirmed real-life identity. The Dutch police unit handling the Odido incident did not respond to requests for comment.
The group also lashed out at the authorities in the Netherlands. “The Dutch police will need all the luck in the world – and everyone’s prayers – if they want to catch him before we carry out another large-scale data theft in the Netherlands,” the ShinyHunters statement said. “Frankly, the Dutch police are a big joke; they are incapable of doing anything. Incompetent. Irrelevant. Unimportant. Useless.”
FBI, CL0P HACKS
Just days after sources say Van der Stap was detained by Dutch authorities, ShinyHunters claimed credit for an unusually brazen breach at the FBI’s job application site apply.fbijobs.gov. According to reporting from 404 Media, the data stolen from the FBI site includes Social Security numbers and personal information on more than 5,000 officials.
404 Media and Reuters reported the FBI data included each person’s job title or team, such as special agent, threat intake examiner, major cybercrimes unit, and those investigating cyber threats from foreign state-backed actors. Reuters examined documents shared by ShinyHunters and found they included sensitive psychiatric and medical files of FBI staff. The FBI issued a brief statement confirming the hack.
ShinyHunters said it gained access to the FBI site and other victims by exploiting a recently patched vulnerability (CVE-2026-35273) in PeopleSoft, a software-as-a-service platform from the software giant Oracle that is broadly used by companies to manage hiring and human resources, benefits and payroll. Oracle quickly issued a fix for the Peoplesoft vulnerability that ShinyHunters reportedly began exploiting as a zero-day in June, and at the time Mandiant released web application firewall rules intended for organizations who couldn’t apply the security update quickly enough.
But on Friday, BleepingComputer reported that ShinyHunters used a URL-encoding trick to bypass Mandiant’s suggested web application firewall rules designed to mitigate the threat from the PeopleSoft flaw. In a report released Sept. 25, security experts at Mandiant and the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) confirmed that ShinyHunters had mass-exploited the PeopleSoft vulnerability to steal data from dozens of systems across a range of industries, including higher education, technology, healthcare, agriculture, transportation and government.
Van der Stap’s former hacker alias Umbreon was hidden in plain sight throughout the imagery ShinyHunters used to spread news about the FBI hack: The defacement image that ShinyHunters left behind on the hacked FBI jobs site included an ASCII art design featuring the Pokemon character Umbreon. The message at the top read, “This site has been seized by ShinyHunters. rooting your systems since ’19 ;)” The image appears identical to a defacement message ShinyHunters used in their 2020 hack of the English-language cybercrime community Hackforums.
The defacement message left by ShinyHunters on the FBI jobs site included an ASCII art rendition of the Pokemon character Umbreon. Image: Bleeping Computer.
Multiple sources close to the ShinyHunters investigation said the group’s recent risky attacks against the FBI and one of Russia’s most venerated ransomware groups amounted to a major pivot away from the more measured tenor of the hacking gang’s operations. Those sources said the sudden shift came about after ShinyHunters was taken over by a teenage cybercriminal from Amman, Jordan who goes by the nickname Rey and operates as part of a cybercrime group called ScatteredLapsussHunters (SLSH), which experts say is an amalgamation of three hacking groups — Scattered Spider, [LAPSUS20,000).
The Wired story noted how Mandiant had infiltrated TeamPCP and was secretly responsible for having the crime group’s stolen credentials burned so quickly: Mandiant was secretly feeding those credentials to the major cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft, who quickly invalidated the stolen keys. Meanwhile, the formerly cooperating hacker groups began to blame one another for causing the credentials to become worthless.
Wired’s Andy Greenberg reported that a few weeks after partnering with TeamPCP, “ShinyHunters went rogue, carrying out its own extortions with TeamPCP’s credentials but without giving the supply-chain hackers their cut.”
Mandiant researcher Austin Larsen told KrebsOnSecurity earlier this month that ShinyHunters has been enjoying a successful extortion spree so far this year, and is on track to pull in nearly 100 million in extortion payments from cybercrime victims in 2026.
Van der Stap claims he was never motivated by money and that his earlier hacker activity was driven by a desire to have the world’s most complete collection of stolen databases. Speaking with reporters from Bloomberg in 2024, Van der Stap said that singular focus in turn fueled his desire to carry out cyberattacks.
“The hacking was very easy for me, and it wasn’t a compulsion,” he [told Bloomberg](https://archive.ph/K47wB#selection-1447.0-1447.321). “My habit was collecting. Collecting data, organizing data, downloading data, creating folders.”
DIVD, the nonprofit security research group where Van der Stap previously served as a volunteer, [disclosed on LinkedIn last week](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7508986131779088384/) that the organization was dealing with an internal cybersecurity incident that appears to have involved the malicious use of artificial intelligence. DIVD has released few details about that incident, but a spokesperson for the nonprofit told KrebsOnSecurity it does not appear related to ShinyHunters, nor are there any signs the matter involves the work of a previous volunteer.
Update: 3:44 p.m. ET: Corrected Van der Stap’s age, which is 24 (not 23).
Update, 4:54 p.m. ET: The Dutch police have confirmed the arrest of a 24-year-old in connection with the ShinyHunters investigation. In [a statement on Twitter/X](https://x.com/Pol_Ops_Int/status/2104607979559342174), the Dutch police said the man will appear on Tuesday, September 29 before the chambers of the Rotterdam District Court, and that will provide more information tomorrow.
Amused
“Mom, Phineas and Ferb hacked the FBI and started a beef with a rival ransomware group!”
How different could the Dutch prison system be than the US? “During his trial, van der Stap opted to remain in custody for a time rather than at home, saying he could not find better treatment on the outside for his ongoing psychological issues,”
I hope “the Donald” doesn’t decide to make an issue of this. The last thing the United States needs is another war on another country.
That makes zero logical sense. So no response? You’re mad. They should be bankrupted and hung lol
Trump derangemsnt syndrome is running wild
Maybe the hackers should get real jobs, and move out of mommy’s basement?
The idea ‘ShinyHunters’ as extorted 100M in 2026 is a joke. Clearly haven’t seen EXF only extortion rates are the lowest it’s ever been. Encryption is a different story which these actors have historically never done. They have only posted 150 ish victims and the rest rants. Among that it’s incredibly rare to see any payment to them. They are known in IR circles (coveware) to constantly lie about the data they take from victims and victims are advised to not even engage with these threat actors never mind pay them. Why do these cybersecurity vendors continue to post inaccurate amounts extorted just to keep their big corporate clients on retainer by claiming headlines of massive extortion payments which you don’t want to be the next one so CISOs approve these retainers. Completely broken industry.
The company I work for was hacked by them and I heard our leadership authorized a payment for multiple millions of dollars to this group. Our company was firstly advised by Coveware that this group often lies and exaggerates but that came to be largely false. Other people in our space who’ve paid this same group millions of dollars all say that Coveware and others in IR circles are lying in attempt to make sure the group is unsuccessful in making money. They actually keep their promises. It would be an understatement to say they are lying about the data they take from victims.
FREE MY NIGGA DORT FREE THE REAL,