In what is, at least initially, believed to have been a hacking job sponsored by a state actor, both the U.S. State Department and the White House networks were hacked, it was revealed over the weekend.
The compromise in the systems led officials to take the State Dept. offline on Friday. This precaution disrupted the email traffic of the Department’s employees, as well as the ability to access public website. The system was still down as of Monday, Nov. 17.
The U.S. government’s computer systems were believed to be hacked by operatives backed by a nation state, with the likeliest candidates being Russis or China. The infiltration occurred in September or October.
“The department recently detected activity of concern in portions of its unclassified email system,” a government official told Nextgov. “There was no compromise of any of the department’s classified systems.”
The event was detected “simultaneously” to the White House incident, the official said. The repairs had been specifically planned for this weekend. State is bolstering the security “of its main unclassified network during a scheduled outage of some Internet-linked systems,” the official said.
The U.S. Postal System and the National Weather Service have also recently reported hacking attacks.
