Samuel Case , FISM News
Hackers breached an FBI email system over the weekend, sending thousands of fake emails which warned recipients of a cyberattack. The Bureau said on Sunday that the hackers, however, did not compromise any data or personal information.
“The FBI and CISA are aware of the incident this morning involving fake emails from an @ic.fbi.gov email account,” the FBI said in a statement on Saturday. “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.”
The activity was first noticed by European nonprofit, The Spamhaus Project. The organization released charts showing the emails being sent out in two large batches.
These emails look like this:
Sending IP: 153.31.119.142 (https://t.co/En06mMbR88)
From: [email protected]
Subject: Urgent: Threat actor in systems pic.twitter.com/NuojpnWNLh— Spamhaus (@spamhaus) November 13, 2021
The following chart shows email traffic originating from the FBI mailserver (https://t.co/En06mMbR88 | 153.31.119.142) involved. You can clearly see the two spikes caused by the fake warning last night. Timestamps are in UTC. pic.twitter.com/vPKvzv74gW
— Spamhaus (@spamhaus) November 13, 2021
Over 100,000 fake emails were delivered before the agency took action to address the situation. The identity and motive of the hacker remains unknown.