CORRUPT MILITARY:

Justice Dept. prosecutors say U.S. military is full of scammers ripping off government.

WASHINGTON — The State Department has taken the unprecedented step of shutting down its entire unclassified email system as technicians repair possible damage from a 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.

The official said the State Department shut down the email late on Friday as part of a scheduled outage of some of its Internet-linked systems to make security improvements to its main unclassified computer network.

The shutdown affected the State Department’s unclassified e-mail traffic and access to parts of its public Web site, the official said.

The breach is the latest of a series of electronic intrusions first detected last month on government computer systems at a variety of agencies, from the White House to the U.S. Postal Service to the National Weather Service. The suspected hackers of the White House’s computer network were believed to be working for the Russian government.

The State Department did not publicize that it had been hacked. On Friday, it announced that “maintenance” would be done to the unclassified network during a scheduled outage.

But on Sunday, after the Associated Press first reported the breach, officials acknowledged they had found traces of suspicious activity in their system and were updating security in the middle of a scheduled outage. In a sign of how complete the shutdown was, duty officers were using Gmail accounts.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration acknowledged last week that four of its websites were hacked “in recent weeks.” Chinese hackers were blamed.