A Trump administration official tells Axios that the cyber attack on the US government and the US corporation, apparently by Russia, looks worse every day – and the secrets can still be stolen in ways that have not yet been discovered.
The whole picture: “We still don’t know the bottom of the well,” the official said. Amazing, the violation returns at least in March and continued throughout the election. The US government did not sound the alarm until this Sunday. The damage assessment could take months.
Microsoft President Brad Smith he told the NY Times that at least 40 companies, government agencies and think tanks had been infiltrated.
- The hack is known to have violated the departments of defense, state, internal security, treasury, trade and energy and its national nuclear safety administration – plus the National Institutes of Health.
- 8 countries: Microsoft, which helped respond to the breach, said in a statement that 80% of its 40 customers, who are known to have been targeted, are in the United States, plus others in the United Kingdom, Israel, and the UAE. Canada, Mexico, Belgium and Spain.
In unusually lively language for a bureaucracy, the US Agency for Cyber Security and Infrastructure, which is part of Homeland Security, said yesterday that the intruder “demonstrated sophistication and complex commercial ship”.
- The agency declared the violation “Poses a serious risk to the federal and state, local, tribal and territorial governments, as well as to critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations.”
If that was it a physical attack on America’s secrets, we could be at war.
- Imagine if During the Cold War, the Soviet Union entered a building in Washington and left with mail, budgets, and more.
- Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) Andrea Mitchell told MSNBC: “It’s quite difficult to distinguish this from an act of aggression that rises to the level of an attack that qualifies as war … [T]his is an equally destructive and widespread engagement with our military systems, with our intelligence systems, as has happened in my life. “
gravity it was not immediately obvious, because it was not the “Pearl Harbor cybernetic” that experts warned about: no one took out a power grid or stole a lot of money or destabilized the markets.
- Instead, it’s more like someone’s been coming in and out of the house for months and you don’t really know what he took.
- And maybe they built a secret door. “For someone to have so much access, which is so sophisticated, it is very likely that they have built other ways to enter that are hard to find,” an official told me.
What’s next: President Trump has remained silent about the hack, which means that President Biden’s overflowing box now includes Russian retaliation, damage mitigation and future deterrence.
- Promising to impose “Substantial costs” for the perpetrator, Biden said in a statement that his administration “will make cybersecurity a top priority”: “I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber attacks on our nation.”