‘Massively disruptive’ cyber crisis engulfs multiple agencies

‘Massively disruptive’ cyber crisis engulfs multiple agencies

  • The sophisticated cyber campaign that breached email accounts across the federal government created a deepening crisis Monday as signs multiplied about the scope of the foreign intruders’ reach.
  • Agencies throughout the government scrambled Monday to assess the full scope of the breaches, as did executives in industries including energy and health care.
  • The Trump administration suspects that the campaign is the work of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, according to a second U.S. official, who also requested anonymity to speak freely. The SVR unit dubbed “Cozy Bear” was one of the teams that hacked the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 cycle.
  • Investigators believe that the hackers added malicious code to software updates for an IT product used across the federal government, used that code to pry open doors into agency networks and then used a sophisticated technique to access federal workers’ emails.

– Eric Geller | December 14, 2020