Emails that President Obama sent and received were breached last year, senior officials said.
Credit
Zach Gibson/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Some of President Obama’s
email correspondence was swept up by Russian hackers last year in a
breach of the White House’s unclassified computer system that was far
more intrusive and worrisome than has been publicly acknowledged,
according to senior American officials briefed on the investigation.
The
hackers, who also got deeply into the State Department’s unclassified
system, do not appear to have penetrated closely guarded servers that
control the message traffic from Mr. Obama’s BlackBerry, which he or an
aide carries constantly.
But
they obtained access to the email archives of people inside the White
House, and perhaps some outside, with whom Mr. Obama regularly
communicated. From those accounts, they reached emails that the
president had sent and received, according to officials briefed on the
investigation.
White
House officials said that no classified networks had been compromised,
and that the hackers had collected no classified information. Many
senior officials have two computers in their offices, one operating on a
highly secure classified network and another connected to the outside
world for unclassified communications.
But
officials have conceded that the unclassified system routinely contains
much information that is considered highly sensitive: schedules, email
exchanges with ambassadors and diplomats, discussions of pending
personnel moves and legislation, and, inevitably, some debate about
policy.
Officials
did not disclose the number of Mr. Obama’s emails that were harvested
by hackers, nor the sensitivity of their content. The president’s email
account itself does not appear to have been hacked. Aides say that most
of Mr. Obama’s classified briefings — such as the morning Presidential
Daily Brief — are delivered orally or on paper (sometimes supplemented
by an iPad system connected to classified networks) and that they are
usually confined to the Oval Office or the Situation Room.
Still,
the fact that Mr. Obama’s communications were among those hit by the
hackers — who are presumed to be linked to the Russian government, if
not working for it — has been one of the most closely held findings of
the inquiry. Senior White House officials have known for months about
the depth of the intrusion.
“This has been one of the most sophisticated actors we’ve seen,” said one senior American official briefed on the investigation.
Others
confirmed that the White House intrusion was viewed as so serious that
officials met on a nearly daily basis for several weeks after it was
discovered. “It’s the Russian angle to this that’s particularly
worrisome,” another senior official said.
While
Chinese hacking groups are known for sweeping up vast amounts of
commercial and design information, the best Russian hackers tend to hide
their tracks better and focus on specific, often political targets. And
the hacking happened at a moment of renewed tension with Russia — over
its annexation of Crimea, the presence of its forces in Ukraine and its
renewed military patrols in Europe, reminiscent of the Cold War.
Inside
the White House, the intrusion has raised a new debate about whether it
is possible to protect a president’s electronic presence, especially
when it reaches out from behind the presumably secure firewalls of the
executive branch.
Mr.
Obama is no stranger to computer-network attacks: His 2008 campaign was
hit by Chinese hackers. Nonetheless, he has long been a frequent user
of email, and publicly fought the Secret Service in 2009 to retain his
BlackBerry, a topic he has joked about in public. He was issued a
special smartphone, and the list of those he can exchange emails with is
highly restricted.
When
asked about the investigation’s findings, the spokeswoman for the
National Security Council, Bernadette Meehan, said, “We’ll decline to
comment.” The White House has also declined to provide any explanations
about how the breach was handled, though the State Department has been
more candid about what kind of systems were hit and what it has done
since to improve security. A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to
comment.
Officials
who discussed the investigation spoke on the condition of anonymity
because of the delicate nature of the hacking. While the White House has
refused to identify the nationality of the hackers, others familiar
with the investigation said that in both the White House and State
Department cases, all signs pointed to Russians.
On
Thursday, Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter revealed for the first
time that Russian hackers had attacked the Pentagon’s unclassified
systems, but said they had been identified and “kicked off.” Defense
Department officials declined to say if the signatures of the attacks on
the Pentagon appeared related to the White House and State Department
attacks.
The
discovery of the hacking in October led to a partial shutdown of the
White House email system. The hackers appear to have been evicted from
the White House systems by the end of October. But they continued to
plague the State Department, whose system is much more far-flung. The
disruptions were so severe that during the Iranian nuclear negotiations
in Vienna in November, officials needed to distribute personal email
accounts, to one another and to some reporters, to maintain contact.
Earlier
this month, officials at the White House said that the hacking had not
damaged its systems and that, while elements had been shut down to
mitigate the effects of the attack, everything had been restored.
One
of the curiosities of the White House and State Department attacks is
that the administration, which recently has been looking to name and
punish state and nonstate hackers in an effort to deter attacks, has
refused to reveal its conclusions about who was responsible for this
complex and artful intrusion into the government. That is in sharp
contrast to Mr. Obama’s decision, after considerable internal debate in
December, to name North Korea for ordering the attack on Sony Pictures
Entertainment, and to the director of national intelligence’s decision
to name Iranian hackers as the source of a destructive attack on the
Sands Casino.
This month, after CNN reported
that hackers had gained access to sensitive areas of the White House
computer network, including sections that contained the president’s
schedule, the White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, said the
administration had not publicly named who was behind the hack because
federal investigators had concluded that “it’s not in our best
interests.”
By
contrast, in the North Korea case, he said, investigators concluded
that “we’re more likely to be successful in terms of holding them
accountable by naming them publicly.”
But
the breach of the president’s emails appeared to be a major factor in
the government secrecy. “All of this is very tightly held,” one senior
American official said, adding that the content of what had been
breached was being kept secret to avoid tipping off the Russians about
what had been learned from the investigation.
Mr.
Obama’s friends and associates say that he is a committed user of his
BlackBerry, but that he is careful when emailing outside the White House
system.
“The
frequency has dropped off in the last six months or so,” one of his
close associates said, though this person added that he did not know if
the drop was related to the hacking.
Mr.
Obama is known to send emails to aides late at night from his
residence, providing them with his feedback on speeches or, at times,
entirely new drafts. Others say he has emailed on topics as diverse as
his golf game and the struggle with Congress over the Iranian nuclear
negotiations.
George
W. Bush gave up emailing for the course of his presidency and did not
carry a smartphone. But after Mr. Bush left office, his sister’s email
account was hacked, and several photos — including some of his paintings
— were made public.
The White House is bombarded with cyberattacks daily, not only from Russia and China. Most are easily deflected.
The
White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and intelligence
agencies put their most classified material into a system called Jwics,
for Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. That is where
top-secret and “secret compartmentalized information” traverses within
the government, to officials cleared for it — and it includes imagery,
data and graphics. There is no evidence, senior officials said, that
this hacking pierced it. [SOURCE]
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