FBI Email Hackers Send Thousands Of Fake Messages

The FBI has launched an investigation after thousands of fake email messages were sent from one of its own servers on Saturday 13th November warning of a cyber attack. Hackers succeeded in breaking in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s email systems and sent out tens of thousands of fake emails from an FBI address.

The hacked messages warned of a possible cyber attack, according to the monitoring group Spamhaus.

The fake messages purported to be from a legitimate FBI email address ending in @ic.fbi.gov, the agency said in a statement and appear to be coming from the US Department of Homeland Security.

“This is an ongoing situation, and we are not able to provide any additional information at this time. The impacted hardware was taken offline quickly upon discovery of the issue. We continue to encourage the public to be cautious of unknown senders and urge you to report suspicious activity to ic3.gov or cisa.gov,” the FBI said in a statement.

The hackers sent tens of thousands of emails warning of a possible cyber attack, Spamhaus said on its Twitter account. It included a subject line that read "Urgent: Threat Actor in systems" and appeared to end with a sign-off from the Department of Homeland Security. It also said: "Our intelligence monitoring indicates exfiltration of several of your visualised clusters in a sophisticated chain attack." It continued to read that "Vinny Troia, whom is believed to be affiliated with the extortion gang TheDark0verlord", had been identified as the "threat actor", before recommending people to check their systems.

The FBI said the hardware impacted by the incident "was taken offline quickly upon discovery of the issue"."This is an ongoing situation," it added in a statement.

The hack was first reported by Bloomberg, which, citing Spamhaus, said the attacks started at midnight on Saturday 13th November in New York with a subsequent campaign beginning at 2am. Both the FBI and the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are aware of the incident, the FBI statement said.

Currently it is not yet clear if the emails were sent by an individual with cleared access to the FBI servers or if out-side hackers were involved. According to sources, it is not the classified system that was compromised, but an externally facing account that is used to share and communicate unclassified information.

The incident comes on the heels of a number of high-profile breaches of US government networks in recent months and other attacks attributed to Russian and Chinese threat actors compromised at several US federal organisations, following which CISA  issued a statement mandating all government agencies to immediately update their software.

FBI:      Bloomberg:     Spamhaus:     Reuters:     Sky:     BBC:       DW:       NBC:       SCMP:       MSN:

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