A friend of a suspect in the theft of a huge amount of personal information from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) says he begged the teenager not to do it.
Adem el-Adeb, 19, told Reuters that last month he tried to convince Saif el-Din Hader that an attack on the FBI would provoke a fierce reaction from US authorities, but that Hader did not want to listen to him.
“You are suicidal,” El Adeb recalled a message he sent to Hader in early September. He said he told the teenager he was “crazy” and should give up the idea.
“Not just once. Multiple times. I tried to reason with him.”
The hacker attack, for which the ShinyHunters group claimed responsibility, and in which Hader is suspected to have played a key role, seriously shook the FBI.
Reuters could not independently confirm the extent of the breach, but the FBI, according to a source at the British agency, has informed employees that it assumes the stolen data relates to all employees.
The FBI did not respond to a request for comment on El Adeba’s claims. The bureau previously said it was actively investigating the ShinyHunters hacking group.
Hader, who El Adeba said was 17 years old, was detained in Jordan on September 29 and is cooperating with FBI investigators, sources familiar with the case told Reuters.
Reuters spoke to several former associates of Hader, who was reportedly known in hacking circles by the nickname “Rey,” including El Adeb, better known by his former hacking nickname “Pryx.”
The two were publicly known members of the cybercrime group Hellcat, which emerged in 2024 and claimed responsibility for several attacks that attracted widespread public attention.
Among them was the break-in into the systems of the French company Schneider Electric, during which the hackers demanded $125.000 worth of baguettes as ransom.
Israeli cybersecurity research firm Kela identified the individuals known as Rey and Pryx as Hadera and El Adeba in a March 2025 report, which Reuters has seen.
During a video interview from the United Arab Emirates, El Adeb confirmed that he used the alias Pryx and identified Hader as Rey, but stressed that, unlike his friend, he had left his cybercriminal past behind.
“I’m clean now,” he said.
El Adeb stated that he was born in Tunisia and that his parents moved to the United Arab Emirates for work.
According to him, he and Rey met online when they were 11 or 12 years old and just starting to experiment with hacking.
They were united by their shared support for the Palestinian cause, and they expressed their political views from their early teenage years by changing and defacing the content of websites.
“We thought it was cool when we were kids,” El Adeb said.
“But then we grew out of it. We started to think that hacktivism was a disgrace.”
He didn’t find making money that unattractive, however.
El Adeb said Hader and other young cybercriminals founded Hellcat and embarked on a series of digital attacks, breaking into the systems of organizations around the world.
Analysts say the group was particularly known for publicly humiliating its victims, which El Adeb described as “trolling.”
He declined to reveal how much he earned during the Hellcat group’s cybercriminal activities.
El Adeb said that after Hader’s detention, he permanently deleted most of their messages.
In an interview last year, Hader stated that he had stopped hacking.
Pepijn van der Stap, another suspected hacker linked to the ShinyHunters group, has repeatedly told reporters that he has left theft and extortion behind.
Dutch police arrested him on September 15th, and he is being investigated on suspicion of attempting to organize murders abroad.
Although El Adeb insisted that he no longer participated in cybercriminal activities and described himself as a “retired cyber threat actor,” he admitted that he felt neither shame nor remorse for his hacking past.
“I’m proud to have had that experience,” he said.
“I’m actually very happy and proud to have real experience in cybercrime, in a field full of people who claim to understand these things but have never experienced real hacking.”
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