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An investigation is currently underway by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after it detected suspicious cyber activity on its network.
According to CNN, citing people aware of the incident, the activity reportedly occurred in the agency’s New York office involving a device that was being used to investigate the sexual exploitation of children.
The FBI has said that it is currently looking into the incident and evaluating the full extent of the malicious activity and what it may have caused.
“The FBI is aware of the incident and is working to gain additional information,” said an FBI spokesperson.
“This is an isolated incident that has been contained. As this is an ongoing investigation, the FBI does not have further comment to provide at this time.”
At this stage, the FBI has not disclosed any more information on the hack. The investigation is ongoing.
With the FBI being a high-profile government agency that holds a large database of sensitive information, it is an appealing target for bad actors.
The bureau has been targeted in the past, with cyber criminals using its email servers to spread spam messages, under the guise that they were FBI warnings about malicious chain attacks.
Spam-tracking organisation Spamhaus has said that the tens of thousands of spam messages reached at least 100,000 mailboxes.
Australian government agencies and infrastructure have been targeted in recent years as well, with cyber criminals keeping an eye on Parliament House, according to James Lawson, chief information officer of the Department of Parliamentary Services.
“Parliament House is of particular interest to malicious cyber actors,” he said during a Senate estimate hearing last week.
“There’s constant attempts [by cyber attackers] … to breach our networks and to make targeted attacks against us.”
While Lawson was unable to give a figure of how many attacks on Parliament House had been attempted over the last few months, the government office has been targeted in the past.
Bad actors gained access to Parliament House’s network through mobile devices back in 2021. The attack took place on 25 March and lasted roughly 24 hours.
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