Suspected Russian hackers compromised dozens of Treasury department email accounts and breached the office that houses its top officials, as part of a broad campaign targeting several critical federal government agencies, a senior senator said Monday.
The Treasury Department doesn’t know all of the activity the hackers engaged in or precisely what information was stolen, Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal.
“According to Treasury staff, the agency suffered a serious breach, beginning in July, the full depth of which isn’t known,” Mr. Wyden said.
He added that the hackers had broken into systems belonging to the Departmental Offices division, home to Treasury’s highest-ranking officials.
Separately, the hackers broke into about three dozen email accounts since June at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, including accounts belonging to the agency’s senior leadership, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter.
The NTIA is a bureau within the Commerce Department that works on telecommunications and internet policy.
It wasn’t clear what the hackers were seeking to gain from spying on NTIA emails, but it could range from general intelligence gathering to a mass email leak in the future, or material that could be used to more easily wage future cyberattacks, the official said, adding that “in any case, it’s a gold mine.”
– Courtesy Wall Street Journal