E-mail shut down for FBI.gov

Hackers may have penetrated the commercial e-mail system that hosts FBI.gov accounts, bureau officials acknowledged.

As a precautionary move, they have suspended those e-mail accounts pending a review of the matter, according to an FBI statement.

E-mail messages sent via the FBI.gov domain are limited to unclassified and unsecured communications "and do not impact secure internal and external FBI e-mail accounts," the statement says.

Bureau officials refused to offer further details, including which company hosts the accounts.

Suspension of public e-mail accounts is the latest in a series of information technology problems at the bureau. Officials recently acknowledged that the Virtual Case File modernization effort is adrift, the controversial data packet sniffer called Carnivore is outdated and a computer program has been erasing some of the backlog of untranslated audio material in foreign languages.