{"id":9421,"date":"2021-08-30T05:40:15","date_gmt":"2021-08-30T10:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cmitsolutions.com\/tribeca\/?p=9421"},"modified":"2023-02-17T16:20:40","modified_gmt":"2023-02-17T22:20:40","slug":"u-s-state-department-struck-by-cyber-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cmitsolutions.com\/tribeca-ny-1166\/blog\/u-s-state-department-struck-by-cyber-attack\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. State Department Struck By Cyber-Attack"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The U.S. State Department has recently suffered a cyber-attack leading to warnings of a possible severe breach formulated by the Department of Defense Cyber Command.<\/p>\n<p>Fox News journalist Jacqui Heinrich claimed in a series of tweets over the weekend. She penned, \u201cA cyberattack has struck the State Department, and the Department of Defense Cyber Command made notifications of a potentially serious breach.<\/p>\n<p><iframe src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZkRwk48uUmg\" width=\"850\" height=\"500\" frameborder=\"0\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt needs clarity about when the breach was discovered, but it is believed to have happened a couple of weeks ago.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Heinrich added that the State Department\u2019s mission to evacuate U.S. personnel and allied refugees from Afghanistan has \u201cnot been affected\u201d by the incident.<\/p>\n<p>She further tweeted that \u201cthe extent of the breach, the investigation into the suspected entity behind it, efforts are accepted to mitigate it, and any ongoing risk to operations continues unclear.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Reuters then reported that a \u201cknowledgeable source\u201d had informed them that the department had not experienced any massive disruptions or had its operations impeded in any way.<\/p>\n<p>For the State Department, a spokesperson said, \u201cThe department takes severely its responsibility to safeguard its data and continuously takes steps to make sure that information is protected. Unfortunately, for security reasons, we are not in a position to discuss the nature or scope of any alleged cybersecurity incidents at this time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Commenting on the story, Sam Curry, chief security officer, Cybereason, said, \u201cThe recent cyber-attack against the U.S. State Department is a warning that anyone and everyone can be struck and will be struck. Today, it is a matter of how quickly threats are found and how quickly they are brought to a halt. Overall, the State Department\u2019s networks are enormous, and they are likely to get attacked by nation-states, terrorists, and other adversaries daily. However, sans more data on the present attack, assuming the motives or groups included in this latest action would not be premature.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s no shame in being attacked, and disclosing it in the right way is laudable. However, there\u2019s a world of inconsistency between an infrastructure breach where a nation-state, rogue group, or hacktivist gets in and an information or material breach that causes damage. The State Department isn\u2019t likely to reveal any further details of this attack, given the current chaos on the ground in Afghanistan and lingering tensions with Russia over the Colonial and JBS attacks and China for bearing out the Microsoft Exchange Server attacks, public and private sector security teams should be on great alert. Also, allies of the U.S. across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Africa should be on high alert. Let\u2019s hope the perception by some that the U.S. is distracted doesn\u2019t generate more attacks and chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cmitsolutions.com\/tribeca-ny-1166\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2023\/02\/kaitlyn-baker-vZJdYl5JVXY-unsplash-1-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The revelation has come just weeks after a bipartisan report was published by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which found \u201csevere\u201d shortcomings in the cybersecurity posture of many federal agencies. For instance, the report rated the State Department \u201ceffectively a D\u201d regarding its cybersecurity posture, \u201cthe lowest possible rating within the Federal Government\u2019s maturity model.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Curry added, \u201cThe State Department attack is one of the reasons for the EDR mandate for the U.S. federal government agencies in the recent White House Executive Order. Having a means of finding the attacks like the one on the State Department as threat actors move in the slow, subtle, stealthy way through networks is the only option in returning defenders to higher ground above threat actors. Advanced building resilience, prevention ensuring that the blast radius of payloads is lowered, and generally using peacetime to foster antifragility is feasible. Today, it\u2019s not about who we hire or what we buy. It is about how we adapt and mdify every day.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The U.S. State Department has recently suffered a cyber-attack leading to warnings&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":11822,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmitsolutions.com\/tribeca-ny-1166\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmitsolutions.com\/tribeca-ny-1166\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmitsolutions.com\/tribeca-ny-1166\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmitsolutions.com\/tribeca-ny-1166\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmitsolutions.com\/tribeca-ny-1166\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cmitsolutions.com\/tribeca-ny-1166\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmitsolutions.com\/tribeca-ny-1166\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cmitsolutions.com\/tribeca-ny-1166\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmitsolutions.com\/tribeca-ny-1166\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cmitsolutions.com\/tribeca-ny-1166\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}