FBI's email system compromised, hackers warn of cyberthreat

New York

HACKERS compromised the Federal Bureau of Investigation's external e-mail system last Saturday (Nov 13).

The hackers sent out tens of thousands of email from an FBI email account warning about a possible cyberattack, according to the Spamhaus Project, which tracks spam and related cyberthreats.

The FBI said it, along with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is "aware of the incident ... involving fake emails from an @ic.fbi.gov email account."

"This is an ongoing situation and we are not able to provide any additional information at this time," the FBI said in a statement.

The FBI has multiple email systems, and the one that appears to have been hacked on Saturday is a public-facing one that agents and employees can use to exchange email with the public, according to Austin Berglas, head of professional services at the cybersecurity company BlueVoyant. There's a separate email system agents are required to use when transmitting classified information, he said.

"This is not the classified system that was compromised," said Berglas, who is also a former assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's New York office cyberbranch. "This is an externally facing account that is used to share and communicate unclassified information."

The attacks started at midnight last Saturday in New York with a subsequent campaign beginning at 2 am, according to Spamhaus. The non-profit group estimates that the spam messages ultimately reached at least 100,000 mailboxes. The email came with the subject line: "Urgent: threat actor in systems."

The message was signed by the US Department of Homeland Security and warned recipients that the threat actor appeared to be cybersecurity expert Vinny Troia, who last year penned an investigation of the hacking group The Dark Overlord.

There was no malware attached to the email, according to Spamhaus. The group speculated that the hackers could have been attempting to smear Troia or were staging a nuisance attack to flood the FBI with calls.

Troia did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI urged consumers to be cautious and report any suspicious activity. BLOOMBERG