The U.S. State Department's unclassified email system was intentionally shut down Friday after a cyberattack, according to officials. The classified systems, however, reportedly remained unaffected by the intrusion.

Currently, technicians are working to repair any potential damage done by the hackers as well as bolster security to the email software to prevent digital break-ins like this from occurring again. The Associated Press reported that the State Department will likely address the closure once those repairs have been made this week.

According to Time, an unnamed department official said detection of unusual activity in the email system was first recorded in October, around the same time the White House's Executive Office of the President computer network was targeted by hackers. Despite this monitored disturbance, the systems were not disconnected until last week.

The classified systems were not breached in this attack and the unclassified email is expected to resume operation on Monday or Tuesday.

"The department recently detected activity of concern in portions of its unclassified email system. There was no compromise of any of the department's classified systems," the senior official said Monday. "The department is implementing improvements to the security of its main unclassified network during a scheduled outage of some Internet linked systems. ...This has impacted some of our unclassified email traffic and our access to public websites from our main unclassified system. We expect our systems to be up and running soon."

The U.S. Postal Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are among several other agencies that reported similar attacks in recent months.

USPS said more than 800,000 employees' personal information was compromised during an infiltration of their systems. Data on customers who contacted its call center during the first eight months of this year were also targeted.

NOAA simply said that in its case, four of the agency's websites were hacked.

Related