Sources: state sponsored hackers monitored internal emails at US Treasury and broke into National Telecommunications and Information Administration's Office 365
This Reuters disclosure — state-sponsored hackers reading internal Treasury email and sitting inside NTIA's Office 365 tenant — is the opening entry in an intrusion saga that related coverage keeps extending. A Treasury letter later confirmed China-backed hackers reached some workstations after a vendor flagged the hack on Dec. 8, and subsequent reporting traced access into OFAC, the sanctions-administering office, plus two other Treasury bureaus.
Every agency running the same vendor's software faces forced audits of its update chain, since Treasury itself only learned of the breach when a supplier came forward rather than through its own detection.
Third-order effects
The pattern repeats across the corpus — an official report later counted 400-plus computers accessed and over 3,000 files stolen at Treasury, and bank regulators' mail was intercepted for over a year — pointing to economic-policy agencies as standing espionage targets whose email systems, not just endpoints, are the prize.
The trend: State-sponsored espionage is shifting from one-off network break-ins to sustained, multi-year occupation of US government email and software supply chains.
Struck by fact that for 6 weeks now @realDonaldTrump and 100+ Republican members of Congress have been talking about a hack that never happened - of the vote. Total silence on the one that did happen: Russian hackers inside the Fed. govt.'s own agencies. https://www.nytimes.com/.…
BREAKING: Russian government spies are behind a broad hacking campaign that has breached U.S. agencies and a top cyber firm https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Incident comes shortly after Trump administration fired heads of DHS' Cybersecurity Infrastructure Protection Agency. There is also no current top cyber official. Multiple agencies wrapped up in the investigation. Keep an eye on story (updating): https://www.reuters.com/...
“This is a much bigger story than one single agency,” said one of the people familiar with the matter. “This is a huge cyber espionage campaign targeting the U.S. government and its interests.” https://twitter.com/...
The Russian government hackers who breached top cybersecurity firm FireEye are behind a much broader espionage campaign that also compromised the Treasury and Commerce departments and other government agencies. https://twitter.com/...
“The hack is so serious it led to a National Security Council meeting at the White House on Saturday, said one of the people familiar with the matter.” https://twitter.com/...
Reminder when in July 2017 trump said “Putin and I discussed forming an impenetrable cybersecurity unit so that election hacking, and many other negative things, will be guarded and safe.” Fast forward to 2020👇 https://twitter.com/...
Huge scoop from @Bing_Chris: the US Treasury and the US NTIA have been breached by hackers. A foreign government is suspected and the National Security Council met Saturday to discuss the fallout. https://www.reuters.com/...
Major story here. Foreign government has hacked Treasury; Trump removed the entire leadership at the Cyber and Infrastructure Agency weeks ago and there is a bevy of inexperienced folks having emergency meeting to respond. https://twitter.com/...
This #cyberattack of @USTreasury and other US government agencies, from which data was stolen, by a foreign group linked to a hostile government reportedly prompted an emergency @WHNSC meeting. https://twitter.com/...
This is obviously bad. But there's also often a rush to assume things like this are attempts at sabotage rather than strategic information gathering. There are tiers of bad that aren't crashing the telecommunications grid or overtly harming Americans. https://www.reuters.com/...
It's kind of wild this hacking campaign went undetected for months and then it hit FireEye and then everyone could see it. Big flex and poor targeting choice?
And I mean, literally. Trump went into FBI and DOJ and made sure that everyone with specific expertise in fighting Russia was chased out of there. Welp, Mr. President. They just pwned Treasury. And you not just own that, you invited that.