If whispers can be believed, then Chinese hackers are kicking U.S. government cyber butt and taking names as the growing list of government data breaches now includes the State Department, the White House, NOAA — which includes the National Weather Service and satellite data — and USPS.

The State Department joins the White House, the United States Postal Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on a growing list of hacked government agencies. Expect to hear of more government networks infiltrated as a Georgia Institute of Technology report on emerging cyber threats in 2015 (pdf) states, “Low-intensity online nation-state conflicts become the rule, not the exception.”

State Department hacked at same time as White House unclassified network

An unnamed official told the Associated Press that the State Department’s classified systems were not affected, but the “department shut down its worldwide email late on Friday as part of a scheduled outage of some of its Internet-linked systems to make security improvement t its main unclassified computer network.”

The White House detected suspicious activity on its unclassified network in late October. Although the State Department found “no indication” of being compromised at that time, now a department official claims the “activity of concern” was detected around the same time as the attack on the White House’s network. It’s unclear why so much time passed after its network was infiltrated before the State Department slammed on the brakes and took the “unprecedented step of shutting down its entire unclassified email system.”

NOAA hacked

NOAA was hacked too, but has been accused of trying to cover up the compromise. Not only did NOAA fail to notify the proper authorities about cyber intrusion that occurred in September, the agency went as far as to claim “unscheduled maintenance” on its network was to blame for the unavailability of National Weather Service satellite images. NOAA finally admitted there was a problem on October 20, yet the agency did not admit its systems were breached.