News How foreign cyber-spies compromised America

Tek

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-Speaking at a private dinner for tech security executives at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco in late February, America’s cyber defense chief boasted how well his organizations protect the country from spies.

U.S. teams were “understanding the adversary better than the adversary understands themselves,” said General Paul Nakasone, boss of the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command, according to a Reuters reporter present at the Feb. 26 dinner. His speech has not been previously reported.
Yet even as he spoke, hackers were embedding malicious code into the network of a Texas software company called SolarWinds Corp, according to a timeline published by Microsoft and more than a dozen government and corporate cyber researchers.

A little over three weeks after that dinner, the hackers began a sweeping intelligence operation that has penetrated the heart of America’s government and numerous corporations and other institutions around the world.
Seven government officials have told Reuters they are largely in the dark about what information might have been stolen or manipulated -- or what it will take to undo the damage. The last known breach of U.S. federal systems by suspected Russian intelligence -- when hackers gained access to the unclassified email systems at the White House, the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2014 and 2015 -- took years to unwind.

Lawmakers from both parties said they were struggling to get answers from the departments they oversee, including Treasury. One senate staffer said his boss knew more about the attack from the media than the government.
The attack puts a spotlight on those cyber defenses, reviving criticism that the U.S. intelligence agencies are more interested in offensive cyber operations than protecting government infrastructure.

“The attacker has the advantage over defenders. Decades worth of money, patents and effort have done nothing to change that,” said Jason Healey, a cyber conflict researcher at Columbia University and former White House security official in the George W. Bush administration.

“Now we learn with the SolarWinds hack that if anything, the defenders are falling farther behind. The overriding priority must be to flip this, so that defenders have the easier time.”

 

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