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Massive Russian Government Hack Against US Agencies Discovered
Published 3 years ago
A massive, long-running hack against US agencies and corporations carried out by Russian government cyber agents has been discovered and US authorities are still trying to figure out how deeply we've been compromised.
The hack targeted the SolarWinds Orion network monitoring software by using stolen FireEye hacking tools used to test clients' cyber security. The Russian hackers of the FSB or SVR's APT29 cyber warfare group (A.K.A. Cozy Bear) hid malware in a security update in the spring of 2020, giving them backdoor access into all systems that used that applied the update as well as the client lists of those effected systems.
We know with certainty that the US Commerce Department and the US Treasury were breached, specifically their internal emails. However, all branches of the US Military, the State Department, the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, the FBI, and at least 425 corporations of the Fortune 500 all use the compromised SolarWinds software.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has ordered all federal civilian agencies to power down networks using SolarWinds’s Orion software products. The Russian government denied any involvement in the hacks.