Something happening here

We have been reporting since this past Thursday that the Executive Office of the President has been hit by computer network issues suggestive of hacking, though we have yet to receive a response to any of the several inquiries we submitted to the White House press office. The White House has now chosen to leak the story to Reuters tonight:

Suspicious cyber activity has been detected on the computer network used by the White House and measures have been taken to address it, a White House official disclosed on Tuesday.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, would not say who might have been responsible for the activity on what was described as an unclassified computer network used by employees of the Executive Office of the President.

“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 said.

It was unclear when the activity took place. The official said the technical measures to address the activity had led to limited access to some EOP network services. Some of the issues have been resolved, but the work continues.

“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.

A second administration official said there were no indications at this time that classified networks had been affected.

The White House, like many government entities in Washington, frequently faces cyber threats.

There are a few loose threads hanging from the story, but we are not going to get help from the White House tying them up.

UPDATE: The Washington Post follows up here.

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