ATF, the regulatory agency that enforces federal laws governing firearms and explosives in the United States, has confirmed that one of its systems was compromised after breach claims made by the Qilin ransomware gang.
This follows Qilin adding the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to its dark web data leak portal on Wednesday, without saying whether it had stolen files from ATF's systems or demanded a ransom.
The same day, the ATF published a press release saying that a standalone system was breached in what it described as a "major incident," which is now being investigated in collaboration with the Department of Justice.
"The impacted system operates separately from the ATF enterprise network, and there is no indication that the incident has affected the ATF enterprise network, the ATF eForms system, or any other ATF system," the federal law enforcement agency said.
"Upon discovery of the incident, ATF immediately terminated connections to the affected environment and initiated incident‑response and forensic activities. ATF is coordinating closely with the Department of Justice to investigate."
