White House sees suspicious cyber activity

WASHINGTON — White House technicians recently detected suspicious activity on a computer network at the US presidential mansion, and have taken steps to resolve the issue, an official said Tuesday.

The Washington Post reported that the breach was thought to have been by Russian government hackers.

The White House official said the Executive Office of the President receives daily alerts concerning numerous possible cyber threats.

“In the course of assessing recent threats, we identified activity of concern on the unclassified EOP network,” the official said.

“Any such activity is something we take very seriously. In this case, we took immediate measures to evaluate and mitigate the activity.”

In the course of addressing the suspicious cyber activity, some White House users were temporarily disconnected from the network.

“Our computers and systems have not been damaged, though some elements of the unclassified network have been affected. The temporary outages and loss of connectivity for our users is solely the result of measures we have taken to defend our networks,” the official said.

No additional information was immediately available.