Pompeo confirms Russia WAS behind cyber attack on US that one Congressman compared to Pearl Harbor - as experts say infected networks must be 'burned to the ground' and Senator calls it 'act of war'
Daily Mail
December 19, 2020
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has become the first U.S. official to publicly attribute a massive hacking campaign to Russia, after broad swathes of the federal government and private sector were revealed to be compromised.
'This was a very significant effort, and I think it's the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,' Pompeo told The Mark Levin Show on Friday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman has denied Kremlin involvement, and the Russian embassy said in a statement that the country 'does not conduct offensive operations in the cyber domain.'
The sprawling attack, which went undetected for nearly nine months, compromised the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, State and Energy, as well as a growing list of companies and local governments across the country.
Officials with the nation's cybersecurity agency warn that the breach could be difficult to undo, saying the hackers 'demonstrated sophistication and complex tradecraft' and that it was likely that they had built additional secret backdoors while active inside the compromised networks.
Experts say there simply are not enough skilled threat-hunting teams to properly identify all the government and private-sector systems that may have been hacked, and warn infected networks may have to be 'burned to the ground' and rebuilt from scratch.
Democrats in Congress have spoken out about the cyber attack in strong terms, demanding a harsh response and blasting President Donald Trump, who has not spoken about the attack or appeared in public for the past five days.
'The situation is developing, but the more I learn this could be our modern day, cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor,' said Rep. Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat, in a tweet on Friday.
'Our nation is under assault. This cyberattack could be the largest in our history,' he added, before slamming Trump for his lack of public response to the cyber attack.
Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, told MSNBC: 'It's pretty hard to distinguish this from an act of aggression that rises to the level of an attack that qualifies as war.'
Coons, 57, called the attack 'as destructive and broad scale an engagement with our military systems, our intelligence systems as has happened in my lifetime.'
2 comments:
Nobody really points out that this is could possibly a tit for tat situation. If you don't think our government hasn't been hacking Russia and other nations then I've got some ocean front property for sale for you in Kansas. Similar to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Nobody wants to talk about the U.S. putting missiles in Turkey pointing toward Russia before Russia sent missiles to Cuba.
This is just mostly speculation on my part. It just doesn't seem to be out of the realm of possibilities.
Trump is too busy fighting the bad fight with the election he lost. Also, his head is too far up Putin's ass for him to even care to begin with.
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