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In recent months, various agencies of the US federal government have been the victims of a major cyberattack described in US newspapers as one of the most serious in history. The attack may have caused the loss of private communications between employees of the affected federal agencies and other sensitive documents: according to journalistic sources in the administration, a Russian spy agency was behind the attack, but the news was not reported. officially confirmed.
Among the systems that hackers have managed to access are those of the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Commerce, the latter the only one officially confirmed for now. Sources of New York Times They said investigations have been launched to understand the exact scope of the attack, which also appears to have involved national security agencies. This cyber attack is related to the one reported last week against the large cybersecurity company FireEye, also attributed to a foreign espionage agency.
The cyberattack became known as a “supply chain”, in which widely used software is hacked to infiltrate all systems using that software. In this case, the software of the Texas company SolarWinds, which manages computer networks and which has among its clients dozens of the largest private US companies, as well as the Department of Defense and the Federal Reserve, was hacked. , the central bank of the United States. SolarWinds has confirmed that a vulnerability in its software may have been exploited between March and June for a “targeted attack on the supply chain of a highly sophisticated nation-state.”
FireEye said Sunday night that it had identified a “global campaign” of cyberattacks based on the infiltration of SolarWinds systems, explaining that each attack was very sophisticated, carried out with patience and planning. Large-scale cyberattacks are often carried out with automated programs that attempt to breach computer systems in sequence – in this case, each attack appears to have required human intervention.
The Infrastructure Security and Cybersecurity Agency, the agency in the Department of Homeland Security that deals with information security, has asked all federal agencies to verify the security of their networks and immediately stop using SolarWinds products. , the most famous. of which is Orion software.
the New York Times It says it is still unclear what the purpose of the attack was and what documents the hackers wanted to obtain, just as it is unclear exactly what documents or information were stolen. Sometimes it takes weeks or months to rebuild exactly the damage created by a cyberattack and this appears to have lasted for several months. Furthermore, by exploiting SolarWinds software, it appears that hackers have also gained access to the computer networks of several large American companies, potentially including even Google and Microsoft.
Several people informed of the facts heard by American newspapers have spoken of Russia as the most likely culprit of this great cyber attack. The systems used have been particularly sophisticated and difficult to identify, but Russia in recent years has repeatedly been linked to major cyberattacks against the United States, such as the one that led to the theft of Democratic Party email before the 2016 election. Donald Trump. The Russian embassy in Washington spoke of “unfounded attempts by the United States to blame Russia” for the cyber attacks.
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