We have recently covered cyberattacks on critical industries in this country, specifically on gas pipelines and meat processing facilities.
Given the continuing chaos in Afghanistan, as well as the current administration’s completely ineffectual, damaging, and damning decisions related to the the withdrawal of the U.S. military, it should come as a surprise to nobody that our adversaries will take advantage of the complete chaos for even more cyberattacks.
Indeed, the U.S. State Department (home of many of the disastrous Afghanistan decisions) has reportedly been electronically breached.
The State Department is the latest to fall victim to a cyber-attack and notifications of a possible serious breach were made by the Department of Defense Cyber Command, a source told Fox News Saturday.It remains unclear if any department operations were affected by the breach, but a source familiar with mass evacuation of thousands of Americans and Afghans from Kabul said Operation Allies Refuge has “not been affected”.The extent of the breach and the perpetrators behind the attack remains unclear at this time.”The Department takes seriously its responsibility to safeguard its information and continuously takes steps to ensure information is protected,” a department spokesperson told Fox News. “For security reasons, we are not in a position to discuss the nature or scope of any alleged cybersecurity incidents at this time.”
The timing of the discovery has not been revealed, though indications are that it happened a couple of weeks ago.
A State Department official indicates that their abilities to evacuate Americans and allied refugees has not been hampered.
Of course, Americans can be forgiven if we are skeptical of the claims being made by this administration.
On the civilian front, T-Mobile recently revealed that the personal data of more than five million additional customers was compromised in the recent cyber attack, bringing the total number of people impacted to over 50 million.
The company revealed earlier this week that it was the victim of a “highly sophisticated cyberattack,” and that the data of millions of current and prospective customers — including names and social security numbers — had been compromised. The company reiterated on Friday that it has no indication any of the stolen files include financial information or credit and debit card information.”We previously reported information from approximately 7.8 million current T-Mobile postpaid customer accounts that included first and last names, date of birth, SSN, and driver’s license/ID information was compromised,” the company said Friday, adding that it also determined phone numbers and IMEI and IMSI information (identifier numbers associated with a mobile phone) were also compromised. “Additionally, we have since identified another 5.3 million current postpaid customer accounts that had one or more associated customer names, addresses, date of births, phone numbers, IMEIs and IMSIs illegally accessed.”
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