With President Biden’s aides struggling to find innovative ways to retaliate against Russia for the most sophisticated hacking of government and corporations in history, key senators and corporate executives warned on Tuesday that the “scope and scale” of the operation were unclear, and that the attack might still be continuing.
“Who knows the entirety of what happened here?” Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. “Right now, the attacker” — which appears to be the S.V.R., one of Russia’s main intelligence agencies — “is the only one who knows the entirety of what they did.” Brad Smith said its researchers believed “at least 1,000 very skilled, very capable engineers” worked on the SolarWinds hack. “This is the largest and most sophisticated sort of operation that we have seen,” Smith told senators.
The hearing was a rare public airing of one of the biggest failures of American intelligence since Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: an assault on the “supply chain” of network management software used by governments and most of the nation’s largest companies. SolarWinds was still unclear on how the Russian hackers got into the software it was developing, embedding themselves there as early as fall 2019.
It has been obvious that V.Putin, who spent his life inside Russian intelligence operations, has been ramping up and weaponizing Russia's software tools for some time now. The 2016 election seems to have been simply an early testing. This attack on America started on Fat Donald's "watch". I wonder if he had time to notice between rounds of golf and basking in the adoration of screaming mobs
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"Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine." Virginia Woolf 1897