White House's unclassified computer networks are suspected to have been recently breached by hackers working for the Russian government, according to a report by The Washington Post. Currently, measures are being taken to address the suspicious cyber activity, a White House official disclosed on Tuesday.
Earlier this month, the "activity of concern" was first detected while members of the Executive Office of the President were assessing numerous possible cyber threats, which they are made aware of daily, a White House official told the Associated Press on Tuesday.
Some White House staffers were immediately asked to change their passwords while Intranet or VPN access was also periodically shut off. However, the email system, apart from minor delays, was never reported to be down, The Post reported, citing unnamed sources.
Although the system did not experience damage or show any signs of the classified network being breached, the cyber attack did cause temporary disruptions to some employees of the Executive Office, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declining to comment on who might have been responsible for the illegal activity.
The FBI, Secret Service and National Security Agency are also investigating whether any data has been stolen during the breach.
"In the course of assessing recent threats we identified activity of concern on the unclassified EOP network. Any such activity is something that we take very seriously. In this case we took immediate measures to evaluate and mitigate the activity," the official said.
"Our actions are ongoing and some of our actions have resulted in temporary outages and loss of connectivity for some EOP users," the official said, but nonetheless, the work continues.
Investigators for a private security firm traced back the intrusion to Russian-language machines, discovering malicious code within the internal network of a firm harboring U.S. military secrets to have been program coded and built during working hours in Moscow, The Wall Street Journal reported.
However, it often becomes difficult to determine whether cyberattacks are backed by the Kremlin or merely the work of unaffiliated criminal groups, a U.S. official told the Journal.
Meanwhile, a second administration official confirmed to Reuters that there were no indications that classified networks had been affected.
In 2008, the U.S. Cyber Command, a military organization whose specific task is to protect vital government and private sector computer systems in the country, was created after U.S. military computer networks had been suspiciously attacked by Russian intelligence services.
