Edited by: TJVNews.com
Are the Russians engaged in hacking of government agencies and US corporations? According to former Homeland Security advisor Thomas Bossert, the Russian intrusion is “hard to overstate.”
In an op-ed piece penned by Bossert which appeared in the New York Times on Wednesday, he said that “the Russians have had access to a considerable number of important and sensitive networks for six to nine months.
The Russian hacker group, he wrote, “surely have used its access to further exploit and gain administrative control over the networks it considered priority targets. For those targets, the hackers will have long ago moved past their entry point, covered their tracks and gained what experts call ‘persistent access,’ meaning the ability to infiltrate and control networks in a way that is hard to detect or remove.”
“The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate,” he said, according to a Mew York Post report.
He also said that “at the worst possible time, when the United States is at its most vulnerable – during a presidential transition and a devastating public health crisis – the networks of the federal government and much of corporate America are compromised by a foreign nation. We need to understand the scale and significance of what is happening.”
He added that, “this week, we learned that SolarWinds, a publicly traded company that provides software to tens of thousands of government and corporate customers, was also hacked.
A Fox News report indicated that the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced the foreign cyberattack involving SolarWinds Orion products, which is now under FBI investigation, on Sunday and directed all federal agencies to inspect their networks.
The Post reported that a number of federal departments — including Commerce, Treasury, Homeland Security and the Pentagon — said they had been victims of the hack believed to have been carried out by a group working with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.
Fox News reported that Bossert added later that he suspected the attack was the “product of a nation-state,” saying that “evidence in the SolarWinds attack points to the Russian intelligence agency known as the S.V.R., whose tradecraft is among the most advanced in the world.”
Bossert went on to say that he believes it will take years to know which networks Russian hackers have complete control over and which ones they merely occupy, according to the Fox News report.
The hack came to light after cybersecurity firm FireEye announced it had been breached, as was reported in the Post.
Fox News reported that The Department of Defense said Thursday it has found “no evidence of compromise” in its information network.
“We continue to assess our DOD Information Network for indicators of compromise and take targeted actions to protect our systems beyond the defensive measures we employ each day,” said Vice Admiral Nancy Norton, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency. “To date, we have no evidence of compromise of the DODIN. We will continue to work with the whole-of-government effort to mitigate cyber threats to the nation.”
“In the networks that the Russians control, they have the power to destroy or alter data, and impersonate legitimate people. Domestic and geopolitical tensions could escalate quite easily if they use their access for malign influence and misinformation — both hallmarks of Russian behavior,” Bossert said.