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WASHINGTON: In contradiction to his secretary of state and other senior officials, President Donald Trump suggested on Saturday (December 19) without evidence that China, not Russia, could be behind the cyber espionage operation against the United States and tried to downplay his 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 it is today. 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 is 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 operation against the United States.
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“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,” Pompeo said in the interview with radio host Mark Levin.
White House officials were prepared to release a statement Friday afternoon accusing Russia of being “the main actor” in the hack, 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. The White House did not immediately respond to questions about the statement or the basis for Trump’s claims. The State Department also did not respond to questions about Pompeo’s comments.
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.
Pompeo in the interview said that the government was still “unpacking” the cyber espionage operation 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 the code within US government systems. And now systems from private companies and companies and governments around the world appear.” , said. .
Although Pompeo was the first Trump administration official to publicly blame Russia for the intrusion, 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 weapons, 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 federal agencies as well as “critical infrastructure.” Homeland Security, the agency’s main department, defines such infrastructure as any asset “vital” to the US 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.
READ: US Congress, Experts Concerned About Possible Spy Agency Shakeup Amid Hacking Response
“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 have complained 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 watch 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.
