Associated Press just reported that the State Department has taken the unprecedented step of shutting down its entire unclassified email system as technicians repair possible damage from a suspected hacker attack.
A senior department official said Sunday that "activity of concern" was detected in the system around the same time as a previously reported incident that targeted the White House computer network. That incident was made public in late October, but there was no indication then that the State Department had been affected. Since then, a number of agencies, including the U.S. Postal Service and the National Weather Service, have reported attacks.
The attackers are very likely to be either Russian, Chinese (or both), and they use spear-phishing to get into employee's systems. From there, they tunnel into the network and take control of email servers to spy on internal documents, communications and exfiltrate secret policy related to their country.
At this point in time, stepping employees through effective security awareness training is no "luxury" or a "compliance item", it's a must to get this done ASAP.
