The White House’s computer network has been hacked, with some temporary outages experienced in the executive office of the president, a White House official said Tuesday.
The anonymous official told Reuters that there has been suspicious cyberactivity on an unclassified White House network, but would not say who was responsible for the activity.
“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 the wire service.
“Our actions are ongoing and some of our actions have resulted in temporary outages and loss of connectivity for some EOP users,” the official said.
There were significant delays on Friday with the White House’s distribution of “pool reports” by journalists who cover the president’s movements. They send the reports to other reporters through a list controlled by the White House.
At the time, the White House blamed unspecified “technical difficulties.”
White House officials would not comment on the problems when contacted by the Washington Times last weekend.
A blog called Powerline reported last week that the computer network within the executive office of the president was down for close to a week, and staff lacked basic access to their files. The report said a major security breach is suspected.
A source with knowledge of the White House’s computer systems told The Washington Times that a complete network outage would be “pretty unlikely” because the executive office of the president has multiple network operations centers.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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