Trump remains silent as massive cyber hack poses 'grave risk' to government

[uk666]

Trump remains silent as massive cyber hack poses 'grave risk' to government

When President Donald Trump convened his Cabinet at the White House Wednesday as Washington absorbed news of a massive data breach, the heads of most agencies relevant to the intrusion — including the Department of Défense, the State Department, the Justice Department, the director of national intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency — were absent.

After the meeting, Trump said nothing about the attack, which went undetected by his administration's intelligence agencies for months. As those agencies now mobilize to assess the damage — which the government said Thursday could be more widespread than initially thought, posing a "grave risk to the federal government" — the President himself remains silent on the matter, preoccupied instead with his election loss and his invented claims of widespread voter fraud.

The massive data breach, revealed in the final weeks of Trump's administration, amounts to a dramatic coda for a presidency clouded by questions of deference to Russia and unsuccessful attempts to warm relations with its President, Vladimir Putin. Just as he has largely ignored the latest surge in coronavirus cases, Trump appears to have all but abdicated responsibility in his final weeks in office.

The White House has not listed an intelligence briefing on the President's daily schedule since early October, though officials say he is regularly briefed on intelligence even when a formal briefing doesn't appear on his calendar and a senior White House official told CNN that Trump was briefed on the hack by his top intelligence officials on Thursday.

Biden briefings
Members of President-elect Joe Biden's staff were also briefed by officials on the massive intrusion, an official from the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said. Biden himself has also been given details in his daily classified briefing, which has been listed on his public schedule each day this week.

"Our adversaries should know that, as President, I will not stand idly by in the face of cyber assaults on our nation," Biden said in a statement on Thursday, making no specific mention of Trump or his administration, but also not naming Russia as the culprit.

The wide-ranging and extraordinary intrusion by suspected Russian hackers of US government systems has launched a technical soul-searching mission among the government's leading cyber officials and outside experts over how this months-long, ongoing cyber campaign managed to go undetected for so long.

It wasn't until Wednesday night that the US government formally acknowledged that the ongoing cyber campaign was still active. The revelation comes at a particularly fraught time during a divisive presidential transition and after an election that had been, by all accounts, free of foreign interference.

It's unclear when, if at all, Trump may have been briefed on the latest hack. Nor is it clear how engaged Trump has been in responding.

"It appears the Russians had six to nine months of 'persistent access' to some Department of Homeland Security networks," said Tony Lawrence, CEO and founder of Light Rider, a cybersecurity firm that has clients in both the public and private sector. "If this is the case, it means the Russians had the ability to navigate all networks and control select US homeland security networks during this time."

Several sources have since confirmed that the US government was unaware of the breach until the end of last week or when CISA went public on Sunday night, fuelling concerns about how the hackers managed to remain evade detection from these agencies for several months.

Microsoft has identified more than 40 of its customers around the world that had problematic versions of a third-party IT management program installed and that were specifically targeted by the suspected Russian hacking campaign disclosed this week, the company said in a blog post Thursday. The tech company said that 80% of those victims are in the US while the rest are in seven other countries: Canada, Mexico, Belgium, Spain, the United Kingdom, Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

"It's a certainty that the number and location of victims will keep growing," said Microsoft President Brad Smith, who added that the company has worked to notify the affected organizations.

Silence
It wasn't only election meddling that failed to draw condemnation from the President; he did not raise with Putin the issue of Russia placing bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan when he spoke to him over the summer — another issue that Trump claimed was never contained in his intelligence briefings, even though officials said it was included a written briefing from February.

After multiple US troops were injured in Syria after what the Pentagon described as "deliberately provocative and aggressive behavior" by Russian forces, Trump did not respond. And in October, even after the EU and United Kingdom sanctioned six top Russian officials close to Putin for the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Trump did not.