White House officials confirm breach on unclassified network
October 29, 2014 – 5:30 AMA White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that suspicious activity has been identified on the Executive Office of the President (EOP) network.
The official, speaking to Reuters, said that mitigation efforts were ongoing, but declined to identify the exact nature of the problem.
“In the course of assessing recent threats we identified activity of concern on the unclassified EOP network. Any such activity is something that we take very seriously. In this case we took immediate measures to evaluate and mitigate the activity,” the official told Reuters.
The EOP network was offline for some time last week, according to Powerline, a conservative blog.
Powerline’s John Hinderaker cited unidentified sources who said that IT staffers were having problems identifying the source of the problems, but that systems were taken offline during the initial investigation. They were later restored. There also reports of delays in the press pool last Friday, as reporters received briefings and other notices later than normal last week. The delays were blamed on technical errors.
Powerline’s report somewhat aligns with the White House official’s statement to Reuters, which confirmed that the initial investigation resulted in temporary outages and loss of connectivity.
The investigation is focused on the unclassified network, and officials said there is no indication that classified networks were affected by the incident.
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