How the Russian SVR scored a huge SolarWinds cyber attack win

Published December 18, 2020 7:34pm ET



Sergey Naryshkin, the director of the SVR (Russia’s civilian foreign intelligence service), wrote this in the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper on Wednesday:

The information space is becoming the new battlefield. This is not just about spyware bugs in foreign-sourced computer equipment and cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. … What will [the SVR] be like in a few decades? It is possible to predict with a high probability that its employees will definitely need the ability to assimilate and apply in practice advanced knowledge, freely operate with the categories of the information age, think creatively and outside the box, and successfully adapt to a dynamically changing environment.

Celebrating the SVR’s 100th anniversary this week, one imagines that Naryshkin will be elated. Gaining covert access ports to the networks of thousands of U.S. government and private entities, the SVR has scored a huge win.

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