Russia has hacked into Pentagon email systems, according to a report citing unnamed officials, who were keen to stress that no classified information was compromised.
NBC News reports today that a "sophisticated cyber intrusion" took place around July 25, targeting the Pentagon's Joint Staff email system, which handles non-classified data, and is used by around 4,000 military and civilian personnel working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The report claims that the security breach enabled the attackers to scoop up "massive amounts of data" from their email accounts, which was then distributed "to thousands of accounts on the Internet" in less than a minute.
The Pentagon moved quickly to shut down the entire email system once the attack had been detected, and it remains offline today, although it should be restored by the end of the week. It's not yet clear if the attack was authorized by the Russian government, but NBC's sources said that "it was clearly the work of a state actor."
Russia has previously been accused of distributing malware to facilitate intelligence-gathering, and was also implicated in a cyber-attack on the German parliament back in June.
Source: NBC News
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