Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that while the United States is still unpacking the extent of a massive cyberattack, Russia is “pretty clearly” the responsible party. But President Trump said China could be to blame.
“I can’t say much more, as we’re still unpacking precisely what it is, and I’m sure some of it will remain classified,” Pompeo said Friday on the Mark Levin Show.
“But suffice it to say, there was a significant effort to use a piece of third-party software to essentially embed code inside of U.S. government systems, and it now appears systems of private companies and companies and governments across the world as well,” he added, according to the Hill.
Trump said Saturday, however, that China could have been the perpetrator, apparently in contrast to Pompeo’s claim. The commander in chief had largely been silent about the cyberattack before.
“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control. Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of … discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!). There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA,” Trump wrote on Twitter, tagging Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe.
SolarWinds, a third-party software contractor, announced Dec. 13 that its systems had been compromised by hackers who managed to penetrate the company’s Orion software updates and distribute malware to the computers of its customers.
“This was a very significant effort, and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,” Pompeo said.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said on Thursday that the SolarWinds hack was more massive than initially presumed. The Department of Homeland Security said it “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.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, CISA, and the FBI branded the cyberattack as “significant and ongoing.” The agencies said in a joint statement that while they “continue to work to understand the full extent of this campaign, we know this compromise has affected networks within the federal government.”
