A recently-unveiled scheme to steal the personal e-mail account information of high level U.S. officials included White House staff, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The WSJ report doesn’t provide many further details, other than to note that conducting official business via personal accounts is forbidden.
U.S. officials say that the Obama administration isn’t going to broach the subject with the Chinese until they get more facts.
Government officials are often the subject of targeted phishing attacks, as the Journal notes.
The story notes a couple of other highly targeted attacks against government officials, including one in April reported by the Department of Homeland Security.
“Several employees at the facility were lured into clicking a link in the bogus e-mail that contained malware, which spread rapidly and extensively across the business IT network,” according to a department report.
As TPMIdea Lab reported last month, employees at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the U.S.’ largest energy and science research lab, were also successfully duped in a so-called ‘spear-phishing’ scheme.