The department said on Wednesday (US time) that 3 per cent of its Microsoft Office 365 email accounts were potentially affected,but did not say to whom those accounts belonged. There are no indications that classified systems were affected,the agency said. Office 365 isn't just email but a collaborative computing environment,which means that shared documents were also surely accessed,said Dmitri Alperovitch,former chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Separately,the Administrative Office of US Courts informed federal judicial bodies across the nation that the courts’ nationwide case management system was breached. That potentially gave the hackers access to sealed court documents,whose contents are highly sensitive.
The Justice Department said that on December 24 it detected"previously unknown malicious activity"linked to the broader intrusions of federal agencies revealed earlier that month,according to a statement from spokesman Marc Raimondi.
Loading
Separately,the court office said on its website that “an apparent compromise” of the US judiciary's case management and electronic case file system was under investigation.
The Department of Homeland Security was scouring the system,it said,and cited a particular risk to sealed court filings,whose disclosure could jeopardise a lot more than active criminal investigations.
“The potential reach is vast. The actual reach is probably significant,” said a federal court official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to disclose the information. The official confirmed that the scope of the compromise was national but it was not clear how widespread.