Russia’s Foreign Ministry experienced “large-scale” cyber-attacks originating in Iran and Hungary last month, its spokesperson Maria Zakharova said Friday.
Zakharova said the attacks on the ministry’s mail server, which occurred on June 29, “resulted in grave consequences,” the RBC news outlet reported.
Hackers briefly accessed electronic correspondence between the ministry’s staff, Zakharova told reporters during a regular briefing.
The ministry’s system administrators temporarily blocked its mail service to stave off the attack, she said.
This is the first time Russia’s Foreign ministry has said its servers were successfully hacked.
When a U.S. hacker boasted last October he had successfully hacked the Foreign Ministry’s website, Zakharova said he targeted a defunct version of the site.
Zakharova said that 88 percent of all visits to the Foreign Ministry’s site were cyber-villains with U.S. IP addresses.
In November 2016, the ministry’s spokeswoman described hacks on the Foreign Ministry and Kremlin’s information systems as an “act of the U.S. state-sponsored cyber-terrorism.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in January revealed its website had been under “hundreds and thousands” of attacks every day from different countries, including China, India, the European Union.