The hacks also placed new pressure on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has been without a permanent leader since November.
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.
“This is probably going to be one of the most consequential cyberattacks in U.S. history,” one U.S. official said, after the National Security Council held its second meeting in three days about the attacks, which security experts have linked to Russian intelligence. “That’s the view from inside government — that we’re dealing with something of a scale that I don’t think we’ve had to deal with before.”
The breaches are also focusing new pressure on the executive branch’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which had already taken heat from President Donald Trump for refusing to support his election conspiracy theories. CISA, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, has been without a permanent leader since Trump fired its widely respected director, Chris Krebs, in mid-November. And some government officials have already questioned whether it has the staffing and other resources to help the rest of the executive branch respond to such a sprawling attack.
DHS itself appears to have been one of the agencies the intruders breached, officials said Monday.
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 NSC activated an Obama-era emergency plan and convened a virtual meeting of its Cyber Response Group on Monday to formulate a plan for assessing the damage.
The intruders may have gained access to the email accounts as far back as June, POLITICO and other publications reported Sunday. Such an extended duration raises a huge red flag about the attacks’ impact on the government, said Sue Gordon, a former top deputy in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“It is massively disruptive once you have long-term penetration by a nation-state,” Gordon said in an interview.
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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’ reachhttps://t.co/YO2GavESyR
— POLITICO (@politico) December 15, 2020
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