Anushka Mansharamani
The Justice Department and the Federal Court System in Washington stated that they were one of the 12 U.S. government agencies and private businesses that were compromised by a massive month-long cyber-espionage campaign that U.S. officials had linked to the Russian hackers.
Although the extent of the damage is still unclear, the Department stated that 3% of its Microsoft Office email accounts were affected.
They further stated that they have no information about whether the classified systems were affected.
Dmitri Alperovitch, Former Chief Technical officer stated that Microsoft Office 365 is a collaborative computing environment and thereby any document which was shared was also accessible.
The administrative office of the U.S. Court revealed that the nation’s management system was breached and the potential hackers have access to the sealed documents.
On 24 December 2020, the Justice Department stated that they had detected a previously unknown malicious activity which linked to the broader intrusions of the federal agencies.
On the court’s website, there was a mention of an apparent compromise in the judiciary’s case management and that the electronic file system was under investigation.
Furthermore, the Department of Homeland security was also looking into the matter and revealed a particular risk to the sealed files as the disclosure of the files could jeopardize a lot more than just active criminal investigations but all other important documents.
One of the officials confirmed that the scope of the compromise is national but there is no indication of the extent of the damage.
The officials also added that the sealed code documents include national security information, trade secrets, financial data from bankruptcy cases and a lot of confidential information regarding criminal cases and otherwise.
On 5th January, the Federal Law Enforcement and Intelligence Agency formally implicated Russia to be a part of this operation.
US President Donald Trump earlier questioned that consensus, advising that China could be the country to blame.
According to the information gathered the hack is on a grand scale as the intruders are stalking through the government agencies since a long period of time.
According to the experts, the data collected due to the hacking could also highly damage the U.S. National Security.
Furthermore, the experts have estimated that 18,000 organizations were seeded with malicious code however, they believe only a subset is to be compromised.
As per the reports gathered on 5th January it was concluded that 10 federal government agencies were identified as been hacked.
Cybersecurity experts have also stated that the hack is done by the highly skilled cyberspies of the calibre behind the SolarWinds hack are appropriate to keep the foot-print as small as possible to avoid detection.
This breach was discovered by the fire eye which is a prominent cybersecurity company on its network.
The total amount of victims of the crime is still unidentified.
Microsoft on the other hand has declined to comment on how long the intruders were reading the emails in the Justice Department Office 365 environment.