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Showing posts with label Classified Information. Show all posts
US Senate
Classified Information Cyber Attacks Hackers United States US Senate

The US State Department was Recently Hit by a Cyber Attack

 

According to a Fox News correspondent, the US State Department was hit by a cyberattack, and the Department of Defense Cyber Command was notified of a potentially significant breach. The date of the breach is unknown, but it is thought to have occurred a few weeks ago, according to the Fox News reporter's Twitter thread. The current mission of the State Department to withdraw Americans and allies from Afghanistan has "not been harmed," according to the reporter. 

Without confirming any incident, a reliable source told Reuters that the State Department has not encountered any substantial disruptions and that its operations have not been hampered in any manner. On Saturday, a State Department official told CNBC that the agency "takes seriously its responsibility to safeguard its information and takes constant steps to ensure it is protected."

“For security reasons, we are not in a position to discuss the nature or scope of any alleged cybersecurity incidents at this time,” the spokesperson said. 

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs gave the State Department's information security programme a D grade earlier this month, the lowest possible rating given by the government model. The panel found the department to be "ineffective in four of five function areas." 

“Auditors identified weaknesses related to State’s protection of sensitive information and noted the Department did not have an effective data protection and privacy program in place,” it added. The Senate committee also discovered that the department was unable to demonstrate that it had violated data security measures while in transit and at rest. 

According to a cybersecurity report by the Senate Committee, the agency was unable to provide documentation for 60% of the sample employees evaluated who had access to its classified network. On its classified and unclassified networks, the State Department left thousands of employee accounts active even after they had left the agency for significant periods of time—in some cases as long as 152 days after employees quit, retired, or were dismissed. 

“Former employees or hackers could use those unexpired credentials to gain access to State’s sensitive and classified information, while appearing to be an authorized user,” the report stated.
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National Threat
Classified Information Cyber Crime FBI National Threat

FBI Analyst Charged for Stealing National Security Documents

 

An FBI employee with a top-secret security clearance has been indicted on charges that she illegally stored several national security documents and other national security information at home over more than a decade, the Justice Department stated on Friday. 

Kendra Kingsbury, a 48-year-old from Dodge City, Kansas, is accused of taking a range of materials between 2004 and 2017, many of which were marked secret because they discussed intelligence sources and methods containing information about operatives such as a suspected associate of Osama bin Laden. The files were from 2005 and 2006, when bin Laden, who engineered the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was alive and on the run from U.S. forces. 

The grand jury indictment, filed in the Western District of Missouri, alleges that Kingsbury illegally removed documents she was granted access to at work and stored them at home. She is charged with two counts of gathering, transmitting, or losing defense information, a felony that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years.

“The documents include information about al-Qaeda members on the African continent, including a suspected associate of Usama bin Laden,” the indictment reads. In addition, there are documents regarding the activities of emerging terrorists and their efforts to establish themselves in support of al-Qaeda in Africa,” the indictment reads. 

Though Kingsbury held a top-secret security clearance and was assigned to squads covering a range of crimes and threats, she did not have a “need to know” the information in most of the documents, prosecutors say. However, the indictment does not provide a reason for why Kingsbury mishandled the documents, nor does it accuse her of having transmitted the information to anyone else. The Justice Department declined to elaborate beyond the indictment on Friday.

“As an intelligence analyst for the FBI, the defendant was entrusted with access to sensitive government materials. Insider threats are a significant danger to our national security, and we will continue to work relentlessly to identify, pursue and prosecute individuals who pose such a threat,” John Demers, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in a statement.

In 2018, the FBI collaborated with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to set up an updated framework meant to guide the U.S. government’s National Insider Threat Task Force (NITTF). Last month the NITTF issued an advisory on protecting against insider threats to critical infrastructure entities, including those with work touching on the U.S. electric grid, telecommunications networks, and hospitals.
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