FBI’s cyber silence

Failed to alert targets of Russian hack bids

The FBI failed to inform scores of US government officials that Russian hackers had targeted their personal Gmail accounts, even though it had evidence for a year that the officials were on the Kremlin’s hit list, it was reported Sunday.

Of nearly 80 people caught in the crosshairs of the Kremlin-linked cyber-espionage group Fancy Bear, only two said the FBI had alerted them about it, The Associated Press reported. Fancy Bear was also behind the theft of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election.

“It’s utterly confounding,” Philip Reiner, a former senior director at the National Security Council, said after the AP notified him that he was on Fancy Bear’s hit list in 2015. “You’ve got to tell your people. You’ve got to protect your people.”

The FBI would not elaborate on its response to the group’s cybercampaign, saying it “routinely notifies individuals and organizations of potential threat information.”

But three people familiar with the matter — including a current and a former government official — told the AP that the FBI had been aware of Fancy Bear’s attempts to break into Gmail accounts for a year.

A senior FBI official said the sheer number of attempted hacks overwhelmed the bureau.

“It’s a matter of triaging to the best of our ability the volume of the targets who are out there,” said the official, whom the AP did not identify.

Examining a list provided by cybersecurity firm Secureworks, the AP identified more than 500 people or groups targeted by Fancy Bear and reached out to more than 190 of them, interviewing nearly 80.

Although only two interviewees said the FBI had informed them their Gmail accounts had been targeted, a few others were contacted by the agency after their e-mails became public during last year’s election.

Charles Sowell, a former senior administrator in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who was targeted two years ago, said the FBI should have been able to analyze the information.

“It’s absolutely not OK for them to use an excuse that there’s too much data,” he said. “Would that hold water if there were a serial-killer investigation and people were calling in tips left and right and they were holding up their hands and saying, ‘It’s too much’? That’s ridiculous.”