US regulator OCC says its executives’ emails were hacked

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(Reuters) -The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said on Tuesday that emails of executives and other employees of the agency were hacked, blaming longstanding vulnerabilities for the breach.

The U.S. financial regulator said it had told Congress the breach involved unauthorized access to highly sensitive information relating to the financial condition of federally regulated financial institutions.

The regulator said it first learned of the breach on February 11 and disclosed the incident about two weeks later. At the time, the OCC said the breach involved an administrative account in the agency’s email system and that there was no indication of any impact on the financial sector.

The agency regulates and supervises all national banks and federal savings associations as well as the federal branches and agencies of foreign banks.

The OCC said on Tuesday it was launching an immediate and thorough evaluation of its current IT security policies and procedures to improve its ability to prevent, detect and remediate potential future security incidents.

Acting Comptroller of the Currency Rodney E. Hood said in a statement that “long-held organizational and structural deficiencies” had contributed to the incident and that there would be accountability for the vulnerabilities and missed opportunities that led to the hack.

The OCC’s statement did not lay out the specific weaknesses that led to the hack or identify who was thought to be behind it. The agency didn’t immediately return an email seeking further detail on the breach.

(Reporting by Anshuman Tripathy in Bengaluru and Raphael Satter in Washington; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli and Deepa Babington)