After White House computer network breach, now there is yet another government agency computer network that has been targeted by an apparent hack attack. Reportedly, computers at the U.S. State Department have been hacked, and its entire unclassified e-mail system has been shut down to make security upgrades and repair possible damage caused by the hacker attack.
However, according to a senior department official, none of the department’s classified email system was affected by the suspected breach. He said to the tech news site NextGov “The department recently detected activity of concern in portions of its unclassified email system”, “There was no compromise of any of the department’s classified systems.”
The State Department said that it had shut down the email system to schedule outage of some of its internet-linked systems to make security improvements to its main unclassified computer network. Reports suggested that the State Department would address the shutdown as soon as the security arrangements are completed.
So far, a number of government agencies, including the White House unclassified computer network, the National Weather Service, and the US Postal Service, have reported similar cyber-attacks.
Moreover, we can only conclude that government computer systems are especially vulnerable to internet attacks; hence, it must deploy effective security technologies to ensure complete data protection from external threats.
