Spamhaus Project, a non-profit organisation based in Andorra and Switzerland on Saturday (local time) confirmed that emails have been sent from a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) server early today.
Taking to Twitter, the agency said that it had been made aware of "scary" emails supposedly coming from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. The emails warned of a "sophisticated chain attack" on the recipients' cyberinfrastructure.
"We have been made aware of "scary" emails sent in the last few hours that purport to come from the FBI/DHS. While the emails are indeed being sent from infrastructure that is owned by the FBI/DHS (the LEEP portal), our research shows that these emails *are* fake," it had tweeted earlier.
"The following chart shows email traffic originating from the FBI mail server (http://mx-east-ic.fbi.gov | 153.31.119.142) involved. You can clearly see the two spikes caused by the fake warning last night. Timestamps are in UTC," Spamhaus said, posting a picture of the activity graph.
In a later tweet, Spamhaus said that other reports suggest that the Saturday hacking attack was not limited to one database.
"Other, non-ARIN related harvested emails were included in the spam run," Spamhaus said.
Spamhaus Project told BleepingComputer that the fake emails reached at least 100,000 recipients and that the number of affected mailboxes was likely much larger, according to Russian News Agency Sputnik.
( With inputs from ANI )
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