A slew of corporations and federal agencies, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Energy, State, Commerce and Finance, as well as the National Institutes of Health are below the many reported victims of the SolarWinds hacking scandal so far, but don’t worry guys, the president says it’s not a problem.
“The cyber hack is much greater in the fake news media than in reality. I have been fully informed and everything is well under control, ”said President Donald Trump tweeted Saturday after a week of alarming reports of a sweeping operation believed to be backed by a Russian intelligence agency that kept undetected government systems in mind for months.
Investigation into the attack, which was first revealed this month, remain underway, but the hackers reportedly infiltrated Texas-based IT company SolarWinds and used the popular software known as the Orion Platform as a Trojan to spread malware to spy on users’ correspondence and files. SolarWinds’ clients include several government agencies, five branches of the military, and some of America’s wealthiest companies, and the magnitude of what becomes a historic hack is still being assessed.
On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed speculation, saying the effort was “quite clearly” linked to Russia an interview on the conservative radio program The Mark Levin Show. But that didn’t stop Trump from blowing smoke and suggesting that it could all be China’s fault (“it could!”) On Twitter, presumably to get some of the heat from his old brother, the Russian. President Vladimir Putin. He also seized the opportunity to somehow desperately link this widespread hack to his election loss, speculating with no evidence that voting machines might also have been hit.
“Our ridiculous voting machines could have taken a hit during the election too, which is now clear that I won a lot, making it an even more corrupt shame for the US,” tweeted.
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It will not surprise you that it is almost certainly nonsense. Former American cyber chief Chris Krebs, who is Trump fired last month after declining to agree to the president’s electoral fraud, he warned Americans on Saturday not to merge the SolarWinds scandal with voting machine security, as election results can be checked and re-counted to confirm their authenticity. “After all, you can’t hack paper,” he tweeted.
Trump’s nonsense about the SolarWinds scandal being ‘under control’ is probably nonsense too. Members of the Homeland Security and Oversight Committee were briefed on the matter Friday, saying they left with “more questions than answers.”
“After we received a secret briefing from the Trump administration today on the major hack on government systems, more questions than answers remain,” the committee said in a statement. a statement on Friday. “Even in the midst of an unprecedented cyber attack with far-reaching implications for our national security, officials were unwilling to share the full extent of the breach and the identity of the victims.”
SolarWinds said that more than half of Orion’s 33,000 customers may have been compromised after discovering that hackers had installed malware on a service the company uses to push software updates. The attack went unnoticed for nine months, even infecting other tech companies using SolarWinds’ platform, including Microsoft and FireEye. In a long blog post this week, Microsoft president Brad Smith called the breach “an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world.”
On Friday, Pompeo repeated that the hackers have made a “significant effort” to install malware on government and corporate systems through third-party software, but said he couldn’t discuss much else during the ongoing investigations. Many of Trump’s advisers have remained silent on the matter, and even Trump himself remained remarkably silent about the hack for most of the week. Saturday’s tweets are his first acknowledgment of the incident.
If you needed more proof that this is a huge deal, contrary to what the president tweets, Trump’s former homeland security adviser, Thomas Bossert, has said that the “magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate” and that it “will take years. to know for sure which networks the Russians control and which ones they occupy, ”said a piece for which he wrote the New York Times this week.
But hey, what does he know? As Trump has proven many times over the past four years, anything and anyone can be considered fake news media if you nag about it long enough.