Active Members akkiliON Posted November 17, 2014 Active Members Report Posted November 17, 2014 THE US GOVERNMENT HACKS reported recently were more serious that at first thought.The attacks, which started at the end of October, were originally believed to have been directed solely at the White House, taking email systems offline and making external internet access spotty.But Nextgov now reports that the State Department's servers were attacked at the same time. Both systems remain under attack which has now led the servers to be suspended while security upgrades take place.It is suspected that Russian, or possibly Chinese, hackers employed by the state are responsible, but the US has played down such concerns, stating that the attacks are on unclassified servers.Neither party has claimed responsibility and no-one from the US government is willing to do more than speculate that this is the cause."The department recently detected activity of concern in portions of its unclassified email system," said a State Department official. "There was no compromise of any of the department's classified systems."The statement goes on to confirm that security upgrades are taking place during a scheduled outage as a result of the attacks.Since the initial attack, other non-critical government systems, including those of the US post office and US weather service, are said to have been targeted.Systems at the State Department will be restored "soon", which will be a relief to employees who may otherwise discover what we did on Monday mornings before computers.Attacks on US government servers are a daily occurrence, but this attack seems to be the most sustained yet by a state-sanctioned group.Russia and China are viable culprits. Already this year Russian hackers have stolen a billion email addresses, while China announced that it will move to its own operating system by 2020 to negate a perceived threat from the US-based Windows. Surs?: US State Department systems taken offline after more foreign state hacks- The Inquirer Quote
