Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sat down for an interview with Mark Levin on Friday, where he made an anxiously awaited announcement. He officially confirmed Russia as the prime suspect in the recent, national security shattering, hack attack.
Pompeo officially fingers the Kremlin
On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made the rumors of Russian involvement official. He told fans of Mark Levin that Russia was behind the massive cyberattack.
From the scale of the attack and list of victims everybody agrees that only a major government would have the resources to pull it off. The question was which one? The media was quick to say Russia, citing anonymous inside sources, but nobody trusts the media these days.
Pompeo cleared the air on that one, but not by much. “This was a very significant effort,” he notes. “I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”
He still won’t say why he thinks that. “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.” Cybersecurity firm FireEye disclosed “several of its own hacking tools had been stolen.”
Reuters was the first to break the news that the Departments of Commerce and Treasury had been hit by hackers. Since then, there have been known intrusions at the departments of Homeland Security, Agriculture, Commerce, Energy, and State.
The attackers came close, but not close enough to our Nuclear program. The fact they were able to infect the fringes at the DOE is a wakeup call. The Pentagon is going frantic. While this borders on an act of war, it’s still just this side of the line classifying it as “espionage.” Pompeo says they’re still assessing the damage.
Nobody connected the dots
Investigators, Pompeo explains, are still trying to determine what specific government data may have been accessed or stolen.
“Suffice it to say, there was a significant effort to use a piece of third-party software to essentially embed code inside of US government systems.” They hit the private sector too. “It now appears systems of private companies and companies and governments across the world as well.”
Scattered reports indicate that there were early clues but nobody connected the dots. Now, officials all say the breach “poses a grave risk” to “networks across both the public and private sector.”
officials who wouldn’t give their names to the press were quick to point the finger at “a Russia-linked entity or Russian individuals as responsible for the attacks.” Pompeo is the first to officially confirm suspected Russian involvement, and he still isn’t saying why he believes that.
Work is going on behind the scenes at the White House, Pompeo assures. “There are many things that you’d very much love to say, ‘Boy, I’m going to call that out,’ but a wiser course of action to protect the American people is to calmly go about your business and defend freedom.”
Pompeo not happy with SolarWinds
Our secretary of state thinks that Russia hacked the system but Pompeo isn’t real happy with SolarWinds for injecting the infected code into government systems. As soon as CNN heard the word “hack” they instantly yelled Russia. They couldn’t wait to report without any evidence that “a Russian-affiliated group known as APT29 was behind the attack on FireEye.”
The cybersecurity company “identified the source of its own intrusion as malware hidden in its software updates published by the software vendor SolarWinds, which is used by a number of federal civilian agencies for network management.” That isn’t good because “as many as 18,000 SolarWinds customers, including US government agencies and Fortune 500 companies, had been sent the updates containing the malware.”
China, Pompeo knows, is a major threat to national security but the media instantly rushed to blame Russia, even zeroing in on the same hackers who allegedly hit the DNC. Many believe that one was an inside job.
Imran Awan, with a flash drive, in the DNC drawing room is lot more likely “Clue” solution than the Russians for that hack, not some shady “Guccifer 2.0” who took the heat. This may still be an attempt to frame the Kremlin. Just like the Obamagate Deep State did to General Michael Flynn.
