In a declaration (pdf) dated September 2024, FBI Special Agent Aaron Spivack described a breach of the Bureau's New York Field Office network that occurred on Super Bowl Sunday in 2023. According to the statement, the incident caused investigators to lose access to roughly 500 terabytes of stored information. Of that amount, approximately 100 terabytes could not be recovered.

Slay News reported on the uncovered document on Sunday.

It provides a rare inside account of how the rather unfortunate breach unfolded, how the FBI's internal systems were exposed, and how an enormous quantity of investigative data vanished from federal custody.

Discovering the Breach

The details appear in sworn testimony Spivack gave during an internal FBI investigation into the mishandling of digital evidence and a cyber intrusion that compromised the Bureau's New York Field Office systems. At the time, he was serving as a special agent on a Hybrid Domestic Terrorism and Child Exploitation squad.

According to his declaration, the breach occurred on February 12, 2023, the night of the Super Bowl.

Spivack did not realize anything was wrong until the following morning.

"The intrusion happened on Super Bowl Sunday of 2023 and I discovered it the very next day; on Monday," he wrote.

He arrived at the office early and logged into one of the forensic workstations used to analyze digital evidence.

"7:30am – I arrived at the office and noticed my Talino computer had restarted," he recalled.

After logging in, the agent saw a text file indicating that part of the network had been compromised. The message included an email address to contact.

At first, the situation was unclear. Spivack ran antivirus software on the machine to determine whether malware had triggered the restart. The scan, he said, "identified one potential threat."

By that point, however, his administrative privileges had already been removed from the system. Investigators later suggested the detected threat may have been a "booby-trap" left behind by the intruder.

Spivack began documenting the events in a timeline prepared for investigators.

As the day progressed, the scope of the incident became clearer. Spivack and FBI technical staff realized their main server was down and other systems in the forensic environment were malfunctioning.