Do you even know that the Russian Federation recently hacked the United States government?
Although it's very hard to believe, actually it is very true. The attack known today as the "SolarWinds Operation", seems to have been orchestrated from Russia. Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State clearly stated today that Russia is behind the cyber-attack.
The attack itself is characterized as being the most harmful cyber-attack directed against the US government in the history. However, it is not very clear how the Russians were involved in the attack, as long as Mike Pompeo refrained from giving any details to the press. Moscow, of course, denied any accusations.
Going back to the hack, all consisted in a direct cyber-attack against the software produced by an American company, SolarWinds. The attack was very clever, because although it has been discovered last week, the specialists say that the virus started to work months ago.
An important thing to mention is that the office that manages nuclear weapons has been targeted by the attack, and not just this one, may other US agencies also. The US officials stated that the nuclear security and its arsenal have not been compromised.
Not only the US has been targeted, but also other several countries, such as the United Kingdom. It is said that the hackers used the same network management software, so many that's why the authorities believe that the same cyber-group is implicated in all these attacks.
The specialists that are involved in solving the issue and to learn, in the same time, what happened, stated that there would be many years until they will fully understand the damage that has been caused by the biggest cyber-attack in the history.
Listening and reading the news, I've extracted several comments of Mike Pompeo, in which he stated that Russia in involved. Moreover, he also said that for several months, the US government, some US governmental agencies, other private companies and other states, had been hacked by Russian hackers, meaning that the security breach was big.
According to Pompeo, there was "a significant effort to use a piece of third-party software to essentially embedded code inside US government systems". So, if a threat actor got access to their tools which are, I believe, quite sophisticated, the could use the same techniques to hack into anything that FireEye, the company specialized in detecting and preempting hack, could hack into, but that's just the tip of the iceberg., as if this wasn't bad enough as a cyber-security incident. Then, it turned out that SolarWinds, one of the companies that builds and manages a lot of IT infrastructure was actually at the center of this hack.
I'm wondering, well I've never heard of SolarWinds, so why do I care? Why do we care? We may not have used SolarWinds directly, as a customer, but the problem is that a lot of the Internet services are used by the companies that we work with it on a daily basis. So they may have SolarWinds in some part of their infrastructure. Thus, if SolarWinds software has been breached, the specialists have do idea how deep this goes and how much access the attackers have to different aspects of the servers, the services, the network that are all operating and have some elements of SolarWinds as part of their setup.
Now, I'll talk a bit about the attack itself and what happened. This is where Sunburst, another term comes in. Now, Sunburst is the actual malware that was deployed as part of the SolarWinds compromise and it's essentially a supply chain backdoor.
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