Bloomberg News
State Department E-Mail System Shut in Suspected Hacking
The State Department detected
suspected hacking of its unclassified e-mail system and shut it
down for security improvements, a department official said.
The incident coincided with a similar attack that affected
White House networks late last month, said the official, who
asked not to be identified because the incident is still under
review. Several government agencies and private businesses have been hit in recent weeks with attacks that have been blamed on Russian or Chinese hackers. The cases remain unresolved.
A coalition of technology companies last month said it had disrupted a hacking campaign linked to Chinese intelligence.
In the State Department incident, none of the classified systems were compromised, the official said.
The department had scheduled an outage of unclassified networks to make improvements to their security, the official said.
While the outage has disrupted some unclassified e-mail traffic and access to public websites, the systems should be running again soon, the official said in an e-mail, without providing a timeline.
The White House said in October that it had identified potentially threatening activity on its computer network and had taken immediate steps to deal with it.
The attack on the executive office of the president last month was an “inconvenience” that “has not affected the ability of White House staffers and others who use the White House network to conduct their work on a daily basis,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said at an Oct. 29 briefing.
For Related News and Information: Hackers Probing Financial System Defenses Show Reasons to Worry
To contact the reporter on this story: David Lerman in Washington at dlerman1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: John Walcott at jwalcott9@bloomberg.net Maura Reynolds, Gail DeGeorge
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