Staff Reports | REUTERS
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said on Tuesday it had notified Congress of a major information security breach involving its email system.
The U.S. financial regulator said an unauthorized access to a number of its executives and employees’ emails, about which it learned on February 11, included highly sensitive information relating to the financial condition of federally regulated financial institutions.
The regulator had first disclosed the security incident involving an administrative account in the agency’s email system in February, and said there was no indication of any impact on the financial sector at that time.
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.
Editor’s Note: Reporting by Anshuman Tripathy in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli
