- On Election Day, General Paul M. Nakasone, the nation’s top cyberwarrior, reported that the battle against Russian interference in the presidential campaign had posted major successes and exposed the other side’s online weapons, tools and tradecraft.
- Eight weeks later, General Nakasone and other American officials responsible for cybersecurity are now consumed by what they missed for at least nine months: a hacking, now believed to have affected upward of 250 federal agencies and businesses, that Russia aimed not at the election system but at the rest of the United States government and many large American corporations.
- Interviews with current and former employees of SolarWinds suggest it was slow to make security a priority, even as its software was adopted by America’s premier cybersecurity company and federal agencies.
- Billions of dollars in cybersecurity budgets have flowed in recent years to offensive espionage and pre-emptive action programs, what General Nakasone calls the need to “defend forward” by hacking into adversaries’ networks to get an early look at their operations and to counteract them inside their own networks, before they can attack, if required.
- But that approach, while hailed as a long-overdue strategy to pre-empt attacks, missed the Russian breach.
- Some intelligence officials are questioning whether the government was so focused on election interference that it created openings elsewhere.
- The United States appears to have succeeded in persuading Russia that an attack aimed at changing votes would prompt a costly retaliation. But as the scale of the intrusion comes into focus, it is clear the American government failed to convince Russia there would be a comparable consequence to executing a broad hacking on federal government and corporate networks.
– David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth and Julian E. Barnes | January 2, 2021
