Hackers spied on the emails of 103 employees of the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for over a year before being discovered in February, as reported by Bloomberg.
The attackers gained access to the OCC in May 2023 by compromising an administrator's email account. The breach went undetected until February 11, 2025, when Microsoft alerted the OCC to suspicious network activity. In that period, the hackers were able to intercept roughly 150,000 emails.
The OCC confirmed that there had been "unauthorized access" to a number of employees' and executives' emails and described it as a "major information security incident." According to OCC CIO Kristen Baldwin, some of those emails contained "highly sensitive information relating to the financial condition of federally regulated financial institutions used in its examinations and supervisory oversight processes."
"The analysis concluded that the highly sensitive bank information contained in the emails and attachments is likely to result in demonstrable harm to public confidence," Baldwin said. The incident has been reported to the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
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