FBI says its investigating claims its systems were compromised – wire taps and search warrants apparently hijacked
- FBI confirms suspicious activity on internal networks
- Breach reportedly affected wiretap and surveillance systems
- Media suspect Chinese group Salt Typhoon involvement
The FBI has said it addressed a recent apparent cyber-incident affecting wiretaps and surveillance systems.
“The FBI identified and addressed suspicious activities on FBI networks, and we have leveraged all technical capabilities to respond,” the law enforcement agency told CNN, without elaborating further.
While the FBI did not specifically say which systems it was securing, CNN said the breach affected systems used to manage wiretapping and foreign intelligence surveillance warrants, citingan anonymous source “familiar with the investigation”.
Another ‘typhoon’?
Just as any other major organization, government or private sector, the FBI is under a constant barrage of cyberattacks. It is of particular interest to state-sponsored threat actors coming from countries such as Russia, North Korea, China, and Iran, and has been breached in the past.
In November 2021, attackers compromised a system used by the FBI to send notifications from the Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal. They managed to send more than 100,000 fake warning emails about a supposed cyberattack. The emails appeared to come from legitimate FBI addresses and warned about attacks by the hacker group TheDarkOverlord.
A year later, attackers infiltrated the InfraGard program (an FBI-run partnership with private companies that share cybersecurity intelligence) by impersonating corporate executives and obtaining memberships. Then, they tried to sell the access on a cybercrime forum.
While the FBI did not say who was behind the breach, the media are suspecting Chinese group Salt Typhoon might be involved, since the same threat actor compromised US federal government systems used for court-authorized network wiretapping requests back in 2024.
Salt Typhoon is known for high-level cyber-espionage campaigns on behalf of the Chinese government. Their biggest achievement was breaching into all major US telecommunications providers (AT&T, Verizon, Lumen, Charter Communications, Consolidated Communications, Comcast, Digital Realty, and Windstream), as well as those in “dozens” of other countries.
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