President Obama’s emails were intercepted by Russian hackers in a breach of the White House’s computer system last year, senior US officials have said.

The unnamed officials told The New York Times (NYT) that the hack, which was reported originally as a breach of unclassified information on president Obama’s appointments and movements, was more serious than at first thought.

The sources said that the hackers obtained access to the State Department’s unclassified system as well as the email archives of people inside the White House.

It is thought that they also managed to break into the email servers of people outside the White House who communicated with Obama regularly, and managed to intercept emails Obama had sent and received.

However, the officials said that the hackers did not appear to have reached the servers that control the message traffic from Obama’s BlackBerry phone. Read more in Theinquirer.