Russians may have hacked White House network

Hackers believed to be working for the Russian government breached the White House’s computer network, officials disclosed on Tuesday.

The suspicious cyber activity appears to have been a sophisticated and sustained attack, lasting for nearly two weeks, according to The Huffington Post.

The Washington Post cited anonymous White House sources blaming the Russian government, which is also believed to have been responsible for hacking into classified U.S. military servers in a series of attacks uncovered in 2008. 

One White House 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 (EOP).

"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 White House official said.

The official said 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 told Reuters there were no indications that classified networks had been breached.

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

Al Jazeera and Reuters