There are a large number of federal companies and agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Energy, State, Commerce, and Finance, as well as the National Institutes of Health. between the many victims reported of the SolarWinds piracy scandal so far, but don’t worry, guys, the president says it’s no problem.
“Cyber Hack is much bigger in fake media than today. I have been fully informed and everything is well under control, “said President Donald Trump he tweeted Saturday after a week of alarming reports about a large-scale operation believed to have been backed by a Russian intelligence agency that monitored government systems for months unnoticed.
Investigations into the attack, which was first revealed this month, are still underway, but reportedly hackers infiltrated Texas-based information technology firm SolarWinds and used its popular software known as the Orion platform as a Trojan horse to distribute malware to spy on users’ correspondence and files. SolarWinds customers include several government agencies, five branches of the military, and some of America’s wealthiest corporations, and the extent of what is becoming a historic hack is still being assessed.
On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed the speculation and said the effort was “quite clear” linked to Russia an interview on the conservative radio show Mark Levin Show. But that didn’t stop Trump from smoking and implying that it was all China’s fault (“it could be!”) On Twitter, presumably to get some of the heat out of his longtime brother, Russian President Vladimir Putin. He also jumped at the chance to desperately link this widespread hack to his election loss, speculating without proof that the voting machines had also been affected.
“It could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I’ve won a lot, which makes it an even more corrupt shame for the United States,” Trump said. he tweeted.
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What you won’t be surprised to learn is almost certainly shit. Former American cyber director Chris Krebs, who Trump fired last month after refusing to follow the trap of the president’s election fraud, he warned Americans on Saturday not to combine the SolarWinds scandal with the safety of voting machines, as election results can be audited and explained by confirm its authenticity. After all, “paper can’t be hacked,” he said he tweeted.
Trump’s uproar over the “under control” SolarWinds scandal is probably also nonsense. Members of the National Security and Oversight Committee were briefed on the matter Friday and said they were leaving with “more questions than answers.”
“After receiving a report from members of the Trump Administration on the major attack on government systems today, we are left with more questions than answers,” the committee told a statement Friday. “Even in the midst of an unprecedented cyberattack with far-reaching implications for our national security, Administration officials were unwilling to share the full extent of the rape and the identity of the victims.”
SolarWinds has said that more than half of its 33,000 Orion customers may have been compromised after discovering that hackers installed malware on a service the company uses to introduce software updates. The attack apparently went unnoticed for nine months and even infected other technology companies that used the SolarWinds platform, including Microsoft i 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.”
Friday, Pompey reiterated that hackers made a “significant effort” to install malware on government and corporate systems through third-party programs, but said he could not argue much further amid ongoing investigations. Many of Trump’s advisers have remained silent on the matter, and even Trump himself remained silent about the hack for most of the week. Saturday’s tweets are his first acknowledgment of the incident.
If you need more evidence that this is a huge deal, contrary to what the president tweets, Trump’s former national 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, ”for a piece for which he wrote the New York Times this week.
But hey, what do you know? As Trump has shown many times over the past four years, anything and everyone can be considered Fake News Media if he complains about it long enough.