The former Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity chief accepted responsibility for the recent cyber-espionage attack on the United States.
Chris Krebs, who was fired by President Trump after stating that the 2020 election was the most secure in U.S. history, accepted the blame for the recent hack, which the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the FBI branded as “significant and ongoing.”
“It happened on my watch,” Krebs told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday. “We missed it. A bunch of other folks missed it, but there is work we have to do now going forward to make sure, A, we get past this, that we get the Russians out of the networks, but, B, that it never happens again. And we really need congressional support. We need the resources. We need the authorities to be able to make sure that, again, this doesn’t happen again.”
He revealed that he was not aware of the attack at the time Trump fired him, and he explained three reasons why he thinks it wasn’t caught sooner.
“As I already said, I think there are three contributing factors,” he said. “First is that, again, the Russians, the SVR, are very, very good at what they do. The second is this supply chain compromise, this third-party trusted supply-chain attack, that is a particularly hard attack vector to defend against. The third is that the federal civilian agencies, the 101 civilian agencies, are not really optimized for defense right now.”
SolarWinds, a third-party software contractor, announced last week that its systems were compromised by hackers who managed to penetrate the company’s Orion software updates and distribute malware to the computers of its customers.
CISA, which Krebs used to lead, said the SolarWinds hack was larger than initially presumed. DHS said, “This threat poses a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said it’s pretty clear that Russia was behind the attack, although Trump floated a subsequent theory that China was actually behind it.
