Russian hack hits Justice, courts

WASHINGTON—The Justice Department and the federal court system disclosed Wednesday that they were among the dozens of U.S. government agencies and private businesses compromised by a massive, months-long cyberespionage campaign that U.S. officials have linked to elite Russia hackers.

The Justice Department said that 3 percent of its Microsoft Office 365 email accounts potentially were affected, but it didn’t say to whom those accounts belonged. There are no indications that classified systems were affected, the agency said.

Office 365 isn’t just email but a collaborative computing environment, which means that shared documents were also surely accessed, said Dmitri Alperovitch, former chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm Crowd Strike.

Separately, the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts informed federal judicial bodies across the nation that the courts’ nationwide case management system was breached. That potentially gave the hackers access to sealed court documents, whose contents are highly sensitive.

The Justice Department said that on Dec. 24 it detected “previously unknown maliciousactivity“linked to the broader intrusions of federal agencies revealed earlier that month.

Separately, the court office said on its website that “an apparent compromise” of the U.S. judiciary’s case management and electronic case file system was under investigation.

The Department of Homeland Security was scouring the system, it said, and cited a particular risk to sealed court filings, whose disclosure could jeopardize a lot more than active criminal investigations.

“The potential reach is vast. The actual reach is probably significant,” a federal court official said.

The sealed court files could hold information about national security, trade secrets and wiretap transcripts, along with financial data from bankruptcy cases and the names of confidential informants in criminal cases, the official added.