Dozens of e-mail accounts at the US Department of the Treasury were compromised in a massive breach of government agencies being blamed on Russia, with hackers breaking into systems used by the department’s highest-ranking officials, a US senator said on Monday after being briefed on the matter.
US Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat, provided new details of the hack following a briefing to US Senate Finance Committee staff by the Internal Revenue Service and the department.
Wyden said that though there is no indication that taxpayer data was compromised, the hack “appears to be significant,” including through the compromise of dozens of e-mail accounts and access to the departmental offices division of the US Department of the Treasury, which the senator said was home to its highest-ranking officials.
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In addition, the breach appears to involve the theft of encryption keys from US government servers, Wyden said.
“Treasury still does not know all of the actions taken by hackers, or precisely what information was stolen,” Wyden said in a statement.
It is also not clear what Russian hackers intend to do with any e-mails they might have accessed.
A department spokeswoman declined to comment on Wyden’s statement.
The department was among the earliest known agencies reported to have been affected in a breach that now encompasses a broad spectrum of departments. The effects and consequences of the hack were still being assessed, although the US Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm said last week in a statement that the intrusion posed a “grave” risk to government and private networks.
In the Treasury’s case, Wyden said, the breach began in July, but experts believe the overall hacking operation began months earlier when malicious code was slipped into updates to popular software that monitors computer networks.
The malware, affecting a product made by US company SolarWinds, gave the hackers remote access into an organization’s networks so they could steal information. It was not discovered until cybersecurity company FireEye determined it had been hacked.
Microsoft, which has helped respond to the breach, revealed last week that it had identified more than 40 government agencies, non-governmental organizations, think tanks and information technology companies infiltrated by the hackers.
US President Donald Trump sought to downplay the severity of the hack last week, writing on Twitter without any evidence that perhaps China was responsible.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr have stated publicly that they believe Russia was to blame, the consensus of others in the US government and of the cybersecurity community.
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