WASHINGTON (AP) –
The Justice Department announced on Wednesday that it was one of the federal agencies harmed by a massive breach of government networks that US officials have linked to Russia.
The extent of the damage was unclear. The department said 3% of Microsoft Office 365 email accounts may have been affected, but did not say who those accounts belonged to. There is no indication that classified systems have been affected, the agency said.
According to a statement by spokesman Marc Raimondi, on Dec. 24, the department discovered “previously unknown malicious activity” linked to the broader federal agency break-ins that came to light earlier that month.
The statement came a day after federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies formally implicated Russia in the intruders, who officials say were part of a suspected intelligence-gathering operation. President Donald Trump had previously raised the idea without proof that China could be to blame.
The hacking campaign was extraordinarily extensive, with the intruders stalking government agencies, defense contractors and telecommunications companies for months by the time the breach was discovered. Experts say this has given the foreign agents ample time to gather data that could be very damaging to US national security, although the extent of the breaches and exactly what information was sought is unknown.
An estimated 18,000 organizations were affected by malicious code that ran with popular network management software from an Austin, Texas company called SolarWinds. However, of those customers, “a much smaller number have been compromised by follow-up activities on their systems,” the statement said, noting that less than 10 federal government agencies so far fall into that category.