Officials do not yet know the scope suspected Russian hacking of multiple federal departments, according to a new report by Politico.
“This is probably going to be one of the most consequential cyberattacks in U.S. history,” one U.S. official told Politico’s Eric Geller. “That’s the view from inside government — that we’re dealing with something of a scale that I don’t think we’ve had to deal with before.”
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The response is being directed by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, even though Trump fired director Chris Krebs for failing to go along with his conspiracy theories about election fraud.
“Agencies throughout the government scrambled Monday to assess the full scope of the breaches, as did executives in industries including energy and health care. The NSC activated an Obama-era emergency plan and convened a virtual meeting of its Cyber Response Group on Monday to formulate a plan for assessing the damage,” Politico reported. “Agencies spent Monday trying to determine whether they had been breached in the cyber campaign, which officials said gave hackers access to emails at agencies including DHS, the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department’s telecommunications policy body.”
One official noted, “We don’t know what has been taken.”
The Trump administration believes the hacking was done by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR.
New: Inside the deepening crisis consuming the federal govt as agencies scramble to figure out if they’ve been hacked.
“This is probably going to be one of the most consequential cyberattacks in U.S. history,” a U.S. official told me.https://t.co/CqPCmbnOpM pic.twitter.com/P8MztzFdHV
— Eric Geller (@ericgeller) December 15, 2020
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