WASHINGTON (AP) – Dozens of email accounts at the Treasury Department were compromised by a massive violation of US government agencies blamed on Russia, with hackers breaking into systems used by the department’s top officials, a senator said Monday after being briefed on the matter.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Provided new details of the hack after briefing staff on the Senate Treasury Committee by the IRS and the Treasury Department.
Wyden said that while there is no evidence that taxpayer data was compromised, the hack “appears to be significant,” including compromising dozens of email accounts and accessing the Treasury Department’s Departmental Offices division, which the senator said was home to his most senior officials. In addition, the breach appears to involve theft of encryption keys from US government servers, Wyden said.
“Treasury still doesn’t know all hackers’ actions, or exactly what information has been stolen,” Wyden said in a statement.
Nor is it clear what Russian hackers intend to do with emails they have accessed.
A Treasury Department spokeswoman declined to comment on Wyden’s statement.
Treasury was one of the earliest known agencies to be reportedly affected by a breach that now spans a wide spectrum of departments. The effects and ramifications of the hack are still being assessed, though the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity division said in a statement last week that the breach posed a “serious” risk to government and private networks.
In the case of the Treasury Department, Wyden said, the breach began in July. But experts believe that the overall hacking operation began months earlier when malicious code was slipped into updates to popular software that monitors corporate and government computer networks.
The malware, which affected a product of the American company SolarWinds, gave elite hackers remote access to an organization’s networks so that they could steal information.
It was only discovered when leading cybersecurity company FireEye determined it had been hacked.
Tech giant Microsoft, which helped respond to the breach, revealed last week that it had identified more than 40 government agencies, think tanks, non-governmental organizations and IT companies infiltrated by the hackers. Microsoft has notified the Treasury Department that dozens of email accounts have been compromised, Wyden said.
President Donald Trump last week tried to downplay the severity of the hack by tweeting without any evidence that China might be responsible. At least two cabinet members, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr, have publicly stated that they believe Russia was to blame, the consensus of others in the US government and of the cybersecurity community.
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