intelligence organization that both hacks into foreign networks and defends national security agencies from attacks - apparently did not know of the breach in the network-monitoring software made by SolarWinds until it was notified last week by FireEye. The National Security Agency - the premier U.S.
While the presence of the software is not by itself evidence that each network was compromised and information was stolen, investigators spent Monday trying to understand the extent of the damage in what could be a significant loss of American data to a foreign attacker. It was evident that the Treasury and Commerce Departments, the first agencies reported to be breached, were only part of a far larger operation whose sophistication stunned even experts who have been following a quarter-century of Russian hacks on the Pentagon and American civilian agencies.Ībout 18,000 private and government users downloaded a Russian tainted software update - a Trojan horse of sorts - that gave its hackers a foothold into victims’ systems, according to SolarWinds, the company whose software was compromised.Īmong those who use SolarWinds software are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the State Department, the Justice Department, parts of the Pentagon and a number of utility companies. United States officials did not detect the attack until recent weeks, and then only when a private cybersecurity firm, FireEye, alerted American intelligence that the hackers had evaded layers of defenses. Investigators were struggling to determine the extent to which the military, intelligence community and nuclear laboratories were affected by the highly sophisticated attack.
WASHINGTON - The scope of a hacking engineered by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies became clearer on Monday, when some Trump administration officials acknowledged that other federal agencies - the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and parts of the Pentagon - had been compromised.
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