Google confirms hackers gained access to law enforcement portal

Google has confirmed that hackers created a fraudulent account in its Law Enforcement Request System (LERS) platform that law enforcement uses to submit official data requests to the company

“We have identified that a fraudulent account was created in our system for law enforcement requests and have disabled the account,” Google told BleepingComputer.

“No requests were made with this fraudulent account, and no data was accessed.”

The FBI declined to comment on the threat actor’s claims.

This statement comes after a group of threat actors calling itself “Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters” claimed on Telegram to have gained access to both Google’s LERS portal and the FBI’s eCheck background check system.

The group posted screenshots of their alleged access shortly after announcing on Thursday that they were “going dark.”

The hackers’ claims raised concerns as both LERS and the FBI’s eCheck system are used by police and intelligence agencies worldwide to submit subpoenas, court orders, and emergency disclosure requests.

Unauthorized access could allow attackers to impersonate law enforcement and gain access to sensitive user data that should normally be protected.

The “Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters” group, which claims to consist of members linked to the Shiny Hunters, Scattered Spider, and Lapsus$ extortion groups, is behind widespread data theft attacks targeting Salesforce data this year.

The threat actors initially utilized social engineering scams to trick employees into connecting Salesforce’s Data Loader tool to corporate Salesforce instances, which was then used to steal data and extort companies.

The threat actors later breached Salesloft’s GitHub repository and used Trufflehog to scan for secrets exposed in the private source code. This allowed them to find authentication tokens for Salesloft Drift, which were used to conduct further Salesforce data theft attacks.

These attacks have impacted many companies, including Google, Adidas, Qantas, Allianz Life, Cisco, Kering, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Tiffany & Co, Cloudflare, Zscaler, Elastic, Proofpoint, JFrog, Rubrik, Palo Alto Networks, and many more.

Google Threat Intelligence (Mandiant) has been a thorn in the side of these threat actors, being the first to disclose the Salesforce and Salesloft attacks and warning companies to shore up their defenses.

Since then, the threat actors have been taunting the FBI, Google, Mandiant, and security researchers in posts to various Telegram channels.

Late Thursday night, the group posted a lengthy message to a BreachForums-linked domain causing some to believe the threat actors were retiring.

“This is why we have decided that silence will now be our strength,” wrote the threat actors.

“You may see our names in new databreach disclosure reports from the tens of other multi billion dollar companies that have yet to disclose a breach, as well as some governmental agencies, including highly secured ones, that does not mean we are still active.”

However, cybersecurity researchers who spoke with BleepingComputer believe the group will continue conducting attacks quietly despite their claims of going dark.