Hackers Target US State Department in Email Breach

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Unclassified emails belonging to the US State Department were recently hacked and then taken offline on Friday, according to a US senior official who talked to Reuters about the security incident. The State Department breach took place at the same time the White House networks were attacked in late October.

This announcement follows a data breach at the USPS last Monday where federal employee social security numbers were compromised in a hack suspected to have been initiated by the Chinese government. The White House was hacked in late October by Russian suspects, while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) also reported a cyberattack by China last week.

When asked whether Russia was involved in the White House attack, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin Dmity Peskov said, “We’ve been hearing a series of groundless allegations against Russia recently. So we can’t take them seriously any longer unless there’s proof.”

The state department official told Reuters on Monday that none of it’s classified systems were compromised. Portions of the system continue to be shut down as officials investigate the attack.

“The department is implementing improvements to the security of its main unclassified network during a scheduled outage of some internet linked systems,” the official told Reuters. “This has impacted some of our unclassified email traffic and our access to public websites from our main unclassified system. We expect our systems to be up and running soon.”

These government attacks join the long list of cybersecurity breaches this year. Banking giant JP Morgan, Target, Neiman Marcus, Home Depot, Kmart and Dairy Queen have all had issues with cybersecurity attacks or malware.

At press time there have been no statements issued by Secretary Kerry or other officials on the State Department website regarding the incident.

This article originally appeared at: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/hackers-target-us-state-department-email-breach