FBI email server victim of a cyberattack
FBI announced in a laconic statement that they are aware of an ongoing incident ‘involving fake emails from an @ic.fbi.gov email account’, and that they were not able to provide any additional information for the time being.
U.S. media estimate that approximately 100,000 people have received emails from the FBI server.
The headline is “Urgent: Threat actor in systems.”, the sender is indeed the ‘ic.fbi.gov’ account and in the body of the emails it was announced to the recipients that they were targets of a sophisticated chain attack from an extortion group known as the Dark Overlord.
FBI announced that the affected hardware was quickly taken offline as soon as the issue was detected and warned the public to be “cautious of unknown senders” and to report suspicious activity to the government.
According to non-profit anti-spam watchdog ‘The Spamhaus Project‘, the emails are causing “a lot of disruption because the headers are real, they really are coming from FBI infrastructure,”
These emails look like this:
Sending IP: 153.31.119.142 (https://t.co/En06mMbR88)
From: eims@ic.fbi.gov
Subject: Urgent: Threat actor in systems pic.twitter.com/NuojpnWNLh— Spamhaus (@spamhaus) November 13, 2021
The Spamhaus Project is an international nonprofit organization that tracks spam and related cyber threats such as phishing, malware and botnets, provides realtime actionable and highly accurate threat intelligence to the Internet’s major networks, corporations and security vendors, and works with law enforcement agencies to identify and pursue spam and malware sources worldwide.
Originally founded in London 1998, Spamhaus is currently based in Andorra la Vella, Andorra, and is run by a dedicated staff of 38 investigators, forensics specialists and network engineers located in 10 nations.
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