Hackers have reportedly spied on 100 email addresses belonging to U.S. Bank regulators at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for more than a year, gaining access to correspondence involving sensitive information regarding banks they oversee and agency deliberations, sources say.
The hackers, whose activities were discovered earlier this year, have monitored employee emails at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) after breaking into an administrator’s account, two people familiar with the situation told Bloomberg.
The OCC — a bureau of the Department of the Treasury that regulates all national banks — reportedly revealed on February 26 that it had recently found a “cybersecurity incident” involving an administrator’s account in its email system.
The agency said it discovered a “limited number of affected email accounts,” adding that they have since been disabled.
The attackers, whose identities remain unclear, infiltrated emails belonging to senior deputy comptrollers and international banking supervisors, gaining access to more than 150,000 emails, starting in June 2023, until they were found and removed in February, the sources told Blomberg.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) says it has not found any signs of impact on the financial sector “at this time.”
But the sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that the OCC now believes the attackers gained access to more email accounts than the agency initially thought.
As Breitbart News reported, the U.S. Treasury Department disclosed in December that it had been targeted by Chinese state-sponsored hackers who broke into its network and obtained access to unclassified documents, as well as then-Secretary Janet Yellen’s computer.
It remains unclear if the OCC breach is connected to the previous attack on the Treasury Department, the sources noted.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
