He urged the government to downgrade what it knows and what it doesn’t.
On Wednesday morning, Illinois Democrat Senator Richard J. Durbin called the Russian cyberattack “practically a declaration of war”.
So far, however, President Trump has not said anything, perhaps knowing that his term is beginning to end, with questions about what he knew about Russian cyber operations and when. The National Security Agency has largely remained silent and has hidden behind the classification of the secret services. Even the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the group within the Department of Homeland Security tasked with defending critical networks, picked up the Russian mega-hack in a noticeably quiet manner.
Mr Blumenthal’s message on Twitter was the first official confirmation that Russia was behind the intrusion.
Trump administration officials have confirmed that several federal agencies – the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, parts of the Pentagon, and the Treasury Department and the Department of Commerce – have been compromised. Investigators struggled to determine the extent to which the military, intelligence services and nuclear laboratories were affected.
The same questions are asked at many Fortune 500 companies that use the Orion network management tool, made by SolarWinds, based in Austin, Texas. The Los Alamos National Laboratory, which develops nuclear weapons, uses it, as does large defense companies.
“How is that not a massive secret service failure, especially since we were supposedly all Russian threat actors before the elections,” asked Robert Knake, a senior cyber officer in the Obama administration, on Twitter on Wednesday. “Did the NSA fall into a huge honey pot while the SVR” – Russia’s most sophisticated spy agency – “quietly plundered” the government and private industry?
Of course, even after placing its probes and beacons on networks around the world, the NSA is barely all-seeing. But if there is a larger investigation – and it’s hard to see how to avoid it – the responsibilities of the agency, led by General Paul M. Nakasone, one of the country’s most skilled cyber warriors, will be paramount.
