A lot of companies and federal agencies, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Energy, State, Commerce and Treasury, and the National Institutes of Health are through many victims reported of the SolarWinds hacking scandal so far, but don’t worry, guys, the president says it’s no big deal.
“Cyber Hacking is much bigger in Fake News Media than today. I was fully informed and everything is well under control, “said President Donald Trump posted on Twitter On Saturday, after a week of alarming reports of a large-scale operation believed to be backed by a Russian intelligence agency that has been monitoring government systems for months unnoticed.
Investigations into the attack, which was revealed for the first time this month, remain in place, but hackers appear to have infiltrated the Texas-based IT company SolarWinds and used their popular software known as the Orion platform as a Trojan horse to distribute malware to spy on users’ mail and files. . SolarWinds customers include several government agencies, five branches of the military and some of the richest corporations in America, and the scope of what turns into a historic hack is still being evaluated.
On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed the speculation and said the effort is “quite clear” about Russia in an interview on the conservative radio program Mark Levin Show. But that didn’t stop Trump from blowing smoke and suggesting that everything could be China’s fault (“maybe!”) On Twitter, he probably took some of the heat from his longtime brother, Russian President Vladimir Putin. He also jumped at the chance to desperately link this widespread hack to the election loss, somehow speculating without evidence that the voting machines could have been affected.
“It could also have been a success on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obviously a big win, making it an even more corrupt embarrassment for the United States,” Trump said. posted on Twitter.
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What you won’t be surprised to find out is almost certainly nonsense. Former American cyber chief Chris Krebs, who Trump fired last month after refusing to go along with the president’s election fraud, he warned Americans on Saturday not to mix the SolarWinds scandal with the security of voting machines, as election results can be audited and told to confirm their authenticity. After all, “you can’t break the paper,” he said posted on Twitter.
Trump’s bluster over the SolarWinds scandal being “under control” is probably stupid. Members of the Internal Security and Surveillance Committee were briefed on the matter on Friday and said they left with “more questions than answers”.
“After receiving a briefing from members of the Trump administration today on the major issue of government systems, I was left with more questions than answers,” the committee said in a statement. a declaration Friday. “Even in the midst of an unprecedented cyber attack, with far-reaching implications for our national security, government officials were unwilling to share the full scope of the violation and the identity of the victims.”
SolarWinds said that more than half of its 33,000 Orion customers could have been compromised after they discovered that hackers installed malware on a service the company uses to push software updates. It appears the attack went unnoticed for nine months and even infected other technology companies that used the SolarWinds platform, including Microsoft and FireEye. Into the a long blog post This week, Microsoft President Brad Smith called the violation “an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world.”
Friday, Pompey he reiterated that hackers made a “significant effort” to install malware on government and corporate systems through third-party software, but said he could not discuss much else amid ongoing investigations. Many of Trump’s advisers have remained silent on the matter, and even Trump himself has remained visibly silent on piracy most of the week. Saturday’s tweets are his first acknowledgment of the incident.
If you need more evidence that this is a huge deal, contrary to what the president is posting on Twitter, Trump’s former internal security adviser, Thomas Bossert, said that “the scale of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate.” and that “it will take years to know for sure what networks the Russians control and occupy,” for a play for which he wrote New York Times this week.
But hey, what does he know? As Trump has proven many times over the past four years, anything and everyone can be considered Fake News Media if you complain about it long enough.