WASHINGTON: The Justice Department and the federal court system disclosed on Wednesday that they were among the dozens of U.S. government agencies and private businesses compromised by a massive cyberespionage campaign that U.S. officials have linked to elite Russia hackers.
The extent of the damage was unclear.
The department said that 3% of its Microsoft Office 365 email accounts were potentially affected, but did not say to whom those accounts belonged. There are no indications that classified systems were affected, the agency said. Office 365 isn’t just email but a collaborative computing environment, which means that shared documents were also surely accessed, said Dmitri Alperovitch, former chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Separately, the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts informed federal judicial bodies across the nation that the courts nationwide case management system was breached, potentially giving the hackers access to sealed court…