US President Donald Trump downplays Russia in his first comments on the cyber attack

In contradiction to his secretary of state and other senior officials, US President Donald Trump suggested on Saturday without evidence that China, not Russia, could be behind the serious cyberattack against the United States and tried to minimize its impact.

In his first comments about the breach, Trump mocked the focus on the Kremlin and downplayed the intrusions, which the nation’s cybersecurity agency warned pose a “serious” risk to the government and private networks.

“The Cyber ​​Hack is much bigger in the fake news media than in reality. I have been fully informed and everything is well under control,” Trump tweeted. He also claimed that the media is “petrified” of “discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may be!)”.

There is no evidence to suggest that this is the case. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday night that Russia was “quite clearly” behind the cyber attack on the United States.

White House officials were prepared to issue a statement Friday afternoon accusing Russia of being “the main actor” in the attack, but were told at the last minute to stand down, according to a US official familiar with the conversations he spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

It’s unclear if Pompeo got that message before his interview, but officials are now struggling to figure out how to square the disparate scores.

Pompeo said the government was still “unpacking” the cyber attack and that some of it would likely remain classified.

“But suffice it to say that there was a significant effort to use a piece of third-party software to essentially embed code within US government systems. And now systems of private companies and companies and governments around the world appear.

“This was a very significant effort and I think it is true that now we can say quite clearly that it was the Russians who participated in this activity,” he said in the interview with radio host Mark Levin.

Throughout his presidency, Trump has refused to blame Russia for well-documented hostilities, including its interference in the 2016 election to help him get elected. He blamed his predecessor Barack Obama for Russia’s annexation of Crimea, has backed allowing Russia to return to the G-7 group of nations and has never criticized the country for allegedly awarding rewards to American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Although Pompeo was the first Trump administration official to publicly blame Russia for the attacks, cybersecurity experts and other American officials have made clear over the past week that the operation appears to be the work of Russia. There has been no credible suggestion that any other country, including China, is responsible.

Democrats in Congress who have received classified reports have also publicly claimed that Russia, which hacked into the State Department in 2014 and interfered by piracy in the 2016 presidential election, was behind.

It’s unclear exactly what the hackers were looking for, but experts say it could include nuclear secrets, plans for advanced weaponry, research related to the Covid-19 vaccine, and information for files on government and industry leaders.

Russia has said it “has nothing to do” with piracy.

While Trump downplayed the impact of the attacks, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has said it compromised both federal agencies and “critical infrastructure.” Homeland Security, the agency’s parent department, defines such infrastructure as any asset “vital” to the United States or its economy, a broad category that could include power plants and financial institutions.

A US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a matter under investigation on Thursday, described the attack as severe and extremely damaging.

“This appears to be the worst case of piracy in the history of the United States,” the official said. “They got into everything.”

Trump had been silent on the attacks before Saturday.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Brian Morgenstern on Friday declined to discuss the matter, but told reporters that National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien had at times been conducting multiple daily meetings with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and intelligence agencies, looking for ways to do it. to mitigate the hack.

“Rest assured that we have the best and the brightest working hard at it every day,” he said.

Democratic leaders of four House committees that received classified reports from the administration on the attack issued a statement complaining that they “were left with more questions than answers.”

“Administration officials were unwilling to share the full scope of the violation and the identities of the victims,” ​​they said.

Pompeo, in the interview with Levin, said that Russia was on the list of “people who want to undermine our way of life, our republic, our basic democratic principles … You will see the news of the day regarding their efforts in cyberspace. We have seen this for a long time, using asymmetric capabilities to try to put ourselves in a place where they can impose costs on the United States. “

What makes this hacking campaign so extraordinary is its scale: 18,000 organizations were infected from March through June by malicious code that was coupled with popular network management software from an Austin, Texas company called SolarWinds.
It will take months to kick the elite hackers off the US government networks that they have been quietly reviewing since March.

Experts say there are simply not enough trained threat hunting teams to properly identify all government and private sector systems that may have been hacked. FireEye, the cybersecurity company that discovered the intrusion in US agencies and was among the victims, has already counted dozens of victims. It is a race to identify more.

Many federal workers, and others in the private sector, must assume that unclassified networks are crawling with spies. Agencies will be more inclined to conduct sensitive government business on Signal, WhatsApp, and other encrypted smartphone apps.

If the hackers are indeed from Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency, as experts believe, their resistance may be stubborn.

The only way to make sure a network is clean is to “burn it down and rebuild it,” said Bruce Schneier, a leading security expert and Harvard fellow.

Florida became the first state to acknowledge being the victim of a SolarWinds hack. Officials told The Associated Press that the hackers apparently infiltrated the state’s health care management agency and others.

SolarWinds customers include most of the Fortune 500 companies, and its US government customers are rich in generals and spies.

– AP