Email accounts used by the senior finance ministry leadership were compromised by suspected Russian government hackers a large-scale cyber espionage campaign against several US federal agencies, according to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon. The leading Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee said the “full depth” of the treasury hack “is unknown”.
The staff of the Senate Finance Committee was briefed on a major treasury violation as part of the SolarWinds hack, Wyden said in a statement Monday night.
“Hackers have broken into systems in the Department of the Treasury Department, home to the department’s top officials. The Treasury Department still doesn’t know all the hackers’ actions, or exactly what information was stolen,” said Wyden.
The Internal Revenue Service said there was no evidence that the agency had been compromised or that taxpayers’ data had been compromised, Wyden added.
Wyden said Microsoft warned the department about the compromise, which began in July.
Cybersecurity experts believe an advanced group of hackers was able to enter US government networks earlier this year through a loophole in the products developed by SolarWinds, which supplies software to government agencies and large corporations.
The hackers then gained access to sensitive information and communications from SolarWinds customers, including the Finance, Trade and Energy Departments and Los Alamos National Laboratory, which oversees the country’s nuclear weapons.
President Trump is running the cyber-espionage campaign, suggesting China could be the culprit, but top US officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr, have pointed their fingers at Russia.
“This was a very important effort, and I think it is so that we can now say quite clearly that it was the Russians who engaged in this activity,” Pompeo said Friday in an interview on the conservative radio program “The Mark Levin Show.”
Barr agreed with Pompeo, saying at a press conference on Monday that it “certainly appears to be the Russians.”
The Kremlin has denied responsibility.