An FBI account was compromised by a hacker who sent thousands of email warning the recipients that they were under cyberattack.
The fraud email hit 10,000 inboxes in two ‘spam’ waves – one just before 5am UTC and another shortly after 7am UTC, according to Spamhaus, a European nonprofit dedicated to tracking digital threats.
The FBI later posted a statement saying that the hardware affected was “taken off-line quickly”.
Spamhaus published a screenshot of an email that Spamhaus had received, warning that the FBI was conducting a sophisticated attack on the chain.
Spamhaus, which considers itself an “international threat intelligence organisation”, took to Twitter to declare that Spamhaus had been made aware of scary emails purportedly coming from the FBI/DHS. [Department of Homeland Security].’
Spamhaus, an European non-profit dedicated to digital threat tracking and monitoring, created a Twitter account naming itself Spamhaus. It announced that it was aware of the “scary” emails sent by the FBI in the wee hours of Saturday morning.
Spamhaus released an example of one of the emails (pictured), which warned organizations that they were under a ‘sophisticated chain attack’
Although the FBI acknowledged that fake cyberattack emails were sent to 10,000 email addresses, they noted that the hardware that was affected had been ‘taken offline rapidly’ by Saturday.
According to the federal agency, the message was sent from an FBI email address. However, the statement stated that the software had been removed rapidly.
DHS Cyber Threat Detection and Analysis Department approved the email with subject “Urgent Threat actor in system”
The email stated that ‘We cannot interfere in your physical life within four hours’, which can be sufficient time for severe damage to your infrastructure.
Twitter alerted the account that these fake warning emails had been sent to addresses taken from ARIN database.
According to its website, the American Registry for Internet Numbers database (ARIN), is a non-profit, member-based organisation that issues IP addresses.
According to the FBI statement, any suspicious activity should be reported to ic3.gov/cisa.gov.
These emails were sent by eims@ic.fbi.gov
Spamhaus is a European non-profit that tracks digital threats. It suggested that the hacker responsible for the emails could have been convincing others to close down their computers, flood the FBI’s with calls, or simply ‘for the fun of it’.
“Maybe all the above.” There might be something else. The account also tweeted and added in a post later: “Who knows what’s going on inside the heads of people who do such things?”
According to the FBI, “We are unable provide additional information at the moment.”
DailyMail.com reached Out to DHS and FBI for Comment
DailyMail.com reached out to DHS and FBI for comments.
This cyberattack against the FBI is the latest.
Hackers backed by Russia monitored the internal emails of the Treasury Department, Department of Commerce and Department of Commerce over several months starting in December 2020.
It involved Microsoft Office 365, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration office software. Sources told Reuters that hackers monitored emails from the agency’s staff for a long time.
APT29, or Cozy Bear was the hacker. They were believed to have been working for SVR (Russian foreign intelligence service).
Just three weeks after the Russian President Vladimir Putin launched another hacking campaign, this time against American companies.
The same Russian-based agency behind last year’s massive SolarWinds cyberattack tried to hack another 140 tech companies, its latest intrusion into U.S. cyber infrastructure.
This happened months after 10 US diplomats were expelled over the hack. In July, Russian hackers infiltrated the email accounts of some America’s top federal prosecutors. There was concern that they might have stolen sensitive information related to the investigations into Ghislaine and former President Donald Trump.
According to the Justice Department, the hackers compromised 27 U.S. attorney offices’ email accounts during the hacking campaign that ran between May 2020 and December 2020.
An official for the Department stated that 80 percent were stolen from Microsoft email accounts belonging to employees of New York’s U.S. Attorney Offices.