Scope, Damage of Massive Russian Hack Still Uncertain

Scope, Damage of Massive Russian Hack Still Uncertain

Via Homeland Security Newswire:

Cyberexperts inside and outside the U.S. government are scrambling to determine the dimensions of the massive hack by Russian government hackers of dozens of government agencies and private organizations. “While the Russians did not have the time to gain complete control over every network they hacked, they most certainly did gain it over hundreds of them. It will take years to know for certain which networks the Russians control and which ones they just occupy,” said Thomas Bossert, Trump’s former cybersecurity adviser. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), after closed-door meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in which members were briefed by the intelligence community, said he was “deeply alarmed, and even downright frightened.”

Cyberexperts inside and outside the U.S. government are scrambling to determine the dimensions of the massive hack by Russian government hackers of dozens of government agencies and private organizations.

On Sunday, 13 December, spyware was discovered concealed inside a software tool used by a large number of U.S. government agencies and businesses. The National Security Council (NSC) met twice, in emergency sessions, in three days. National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien cut short a trip to Europe. The White House has activated the cyber crisis unit, a body established by the Obama administration. Members of the Senate and House intelligence committees have been briefed by intelligence officials.

Lawmakers say that the military spending bill that President Donald Trump is threatening to veto contains provisions which would help protect against the kind of broad Russian hacking. The annual defense authorization bill contains a range of recommendations from a congressionally established bipartisan commission. gives the federal government the ability to actively hunt for foreign hackers trying to penetrate computer networks and establishes of a national cyberdirector who would coordinate the government’s defenses and responses to such attacks.

Had those provisions been in place this year, the Trump administration might have had a better shot at detecting and stopping the breach more quickly, lawmakers said.

Trump’s threatened to veto the bill unless Congress roll back legal protections for social media companies. Trump argues that these social media have been unfair to him.

The Russian government hackers managed to breach the cyberdefenses of departments of Homeland Security, Energy, Treasury, Commerce, Interior, and Health and Human Services. The hackers also got into the Pentagon’s computer systems.

The Russian hackers placed Sunburst, a malware they created, into the Orion platform, a tool for monitoring computer networks marketed by the American company SolarWinds. The hackers’ maneuver was difficult to detect and distressingly effective: Since March, organizations installing certain versions of Orion in their computer networks, unwittingly gave the hackers the keys to the organizations’ most sensitive information.

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