United States of America victims of massive cyberattack
United States of America victims of massive cyberattack
The U.S. administration and thousands of private companies have been the victims of a cyberattack of unprecedented scale since last March. Washington and the country's press point the finger at Russia.
"This is the nightmare that has been keeping cybersecurity experts awake for years," TechCrunchassures. "Since March, at least, hackers probably acting on behalf of Russian intelligence have infiltrated, incognito, the unclassified networks of several government administrations and thousands of companies,"the site adds.
According to CNBC,the hackers "used the network management software of SolarWinds, a Texas-based computer company, to penetrate government networks." Some 18,000 SolarWinds customers, including the U.S. government, downloaded an update to The Orion software, where hackers installed a "backdoor" to give them access to the networks, the channel said.
The cyberattack, which hit the Departments of Budget and Trade, and the Department of Energy's Nuclear Security Agency, was "much larger than expected," CNBC added.
Months to repair the damage
And "the worst may be yet to come," USA Todaysaid. "The Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity unit acknowledged that the exact scope of the attack was not yet known and that an unspecified number of local government and private company networks were 'seriously threatened'."
It will take "months" to repair the damage, APnotes. "Experts say there are not enough anti-piracy teams with the skills to identify all pirated systems, whether public or private,"the agency added.
The Microsoft giant, a victim of hackers with about 40 of its customers, analyzed at length the cyberattack in a blog of its president, Brad Smith, taken up by Cnet. " This is not only an attack on specific targets, but also against the trust and reliability of a critical global infrastructure, to the benefit of the intelligence agency of one nation," Smith said.
Amazing blindness
The Microsoft boss also called for "international agreements to limit the creation of hacking tools, which undermine global cybersecurity," Cnetsaid.
Donald Trump has made no comment on the attack, either to condemn it or to threaten its officials with possible reprisals. But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday night that it was "pretty clear" that Russia was at the helm.
The Kremlin denied that Vladimir Putin's spokesman called on the United States to stop "blaming the Russians without evidence"and assured that the Russian president himself had "invited the Americans to conclude a cooperation agreement in the field of cybersecurity," the official Tassnews agency said.
The Wall Street Journal notes that the cyberattack, "as shameless as it is,"is more a matter of "traditional digital espionage" than a desire to harm. Apparently, "no data has been altered or destroyed, and no infrastructure or computer systems have been damaged,"the business daily writes.
This makes Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor, say that the United States is "staggeringly blind"in this case.
In the columns of the conservative website The Dispatch, he recalls that the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden "clearly demonstrated that the United States regularly enters the computers of foreign governments", often "with the involuntary help of the private sector, for the purposes of espionage". The country is even "very likely the world leader in this practice,"he adds.
Source:- Flash News and News Agencies