On Saturday morning as many as 100 000 people woke up to emails from the Federal Bureau of Investigation except the emails weren’t actually sent by the Bureau.
That’s because the system the FBI uses – the Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal – was breached thanks to a “software misconfiguration” that temporarily allowed an attacker to make use of the portal.
This meant that folks received an email that was from the FBI but wasn’t actually sent by an official from the FBI.
“No actor was able to access or compromise any data or PII [personally identifiable information] on the FBI’s network. Once we learned of the incident, we quickly remediated the software vulnerability, warned partners to disregard the fake emails, and confirmed the integrity of our networks,” the FBI said in a statement on Sunday.
The emails that were sent out claimed that the recipients data had been compromised. The email named one Vinny Troia and a cybercrime group known as The Dark Overlord as the attackers according to a report by Bleeping Computer.
Curiously, Troia, the person named in the email is a cybersecurity expert and founder of Shadowbyte, a cybersecurity investigation firm. This attack seems to have been an attempt to discredit Troia although this appears to be common.
The founder says that a person known as pompomourin regularly attempts to discredit him though attacks.
“The last time they [pompompurin] hacked the national center for missing children’s website blog and put up a post about me being a pedophile,” Troia told Bleeping Computer.
Whether this person was indeed behind this FBI breach, they may have taken this attack too far this time.
Back in October the White House called a meeting of 30 countries to tackle ransomware and other cybercrimes.
“…We are bringing the full strength of our capabilities to disrupt malicious cyber activity, including managing both the risks and opportunities of emerging technologies like quantum computing and artificial intelligence,” said US president Joe Biden.
We don’t think the FBI is going to let this breach slide and we’re curious to see whether the bureau can track down the responsible party.
