The FBI has contained an attack on its IT systems, CNN reported today.
The U.S. federal law enforcement agency told the news organization that the incident involved an FBI computer system used in investigations of images of child sexual exploitation.
Two sources told CNN that the attack involved the FBI New York Field Office – one of the bureau’s biggest offices. The origin of the hacking incident is still being investigated, according to one source.
As Tech Crunch noted, this isn’t the first time the FBI has been compromised. In November 2021, a threat actor compromised the FBI’s external email system to send thousands of spam emails warning of a fake cyberattack to hundreds of thousands of organizations.
The FBI is one of the country’s lead agencies — along with the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — for going after threat agents. In January the FBI revealed its staff penetrated the Hive ransomware gang’s computer network last summer, captured its decryption keys and offered them to victims worldwide to decrypt their scrambled data.