The U.S. State Department has shut down its unclassified email system in a last-ditch attempt to purge its network off hackers, who were discovered lurking in the Department's unclassified network since November.
State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki announced in a statement on Friday that the department is "implementing improvements to the security of its main unclassified networking during a short, planned outage of some Internet-linked systems."
ABC News reporter Justin Fishnel says on Twitter that large parts of the State Department's unclassified network have already been shut down on Friday afternoon, leaving employees unable to send emails outside of the Department's network and access the Internet. Fishnel reports that the system could remain in the dark over the weekend as IT technicians from the public and private sectors work to remove the intruders from the system.
Large parts of the unclassified email systems at State are down now and could remain down through the weekend as they are being worked on.
— Justin Fishel (@JustinFishelABC) March 13, 2015
However, the Department did not specify how long the outage is going to be or when it will end.
"The Department continues to closely monitor and respond to activity of concern on our unclassified network," Psaki says. "Such activity is something we take very seriously."
Experts believe hackers backed by the Russian government were able to breach the State Department's unclassified network after an employee clicked on a bogus link, giving away his login information, in a phishing email purporting to be an administrative email from one of his colleagues. The Department insists that hackers were not able to penetrate its highly sensitive classified network, although sensitive data still goes into unclassified emails.
"There has been no compromise of any of the Department's classified systems, nor of our core financial, consular and human resource systems," says Psaki. "The recent increase in news reports regarding cyber incidents reflects that the department is among a growing list of public institutions and private industries facing an increasing number of sophisticated cyber threats."
Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that experts from the National Security Agency (NSA) and outside contractors have scanned the Department's network and taken down different parts of the system multiple times, but the hackers continued to be able to breach the system. Sources cited by the Journal said the hackers were able to get around the NSA's blocks by repeatedly changing their code each time the Department put up new defenses to get rid of them.
The latest Federal Information Security Management report reveals the State Department has one of the lowest cybersecurity assessment scores among all federal agencies, sharing the dishonor with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
However, the Department seems to be aware of the work that needs to be done and has requested for $10 million in its 2016 budget to be geared toward "cyber enhancements," which will include a "re-architecting" of its unclassified and classified systems and the replacement of "obsolete operational infrastructure" with updated technology.
