The Biden administration has since buckled down on working with critical infrastructure owners and operators to enhance security for sectors including water, the electric grid and oil and gas pipelines.ĭOD is now aiming to tighten these bonds with the private sector- which controls almost 90 percent of all critical U.S. This is how we have to defend our nation,” he said. Colonial Pipeline got the Pentagon to rethink that. It was carried out by a cybercriminal group on a private business - a company the federal government did not directly protect - and involved a major disruption to daily life.ĭOD had always left such ransomware attacks to law enforcement agencies to handle, Nakasone said. The Colonial Pipeline hack showed a particular gap. Paul Nakasone, head of both the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, in an interview at the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. “2021, this is the inflection point for the nation in cyberspace, this is when cybersecurity became national security,” said Gen. didn’t have the cyber defenses it needed. Ransomware attacks later in the year on meat producer JBS Foods and on IT management group Kaseya, both linked to Russian-based cybercriminal groups, added to the sense throughout the government and the country that the U.S. In 2021, a ransomware strike on Colonial Pipeline forced the shutdown of the line that provided around half the East Coast’s gas supply. discovered that Russian government hackers had infiltrated the networks of at least a dozen federal agencies in what became known as the SolarWinds hack. “During those days, I would frustratingly refer to Cyber Command as the ‘clean up on Aisle 6’ and ‘break glass in time of war’ command.”īut during Moore’s tenure, the increasing number and variety of cyber strikes garnered wider attention. Charlie Moore, who served as deputy commander of Cyber Command from 2020 to 2022. Cyber Command to really only be prepared to help recover from a cyber event and to develop capabilities that would only be used during war,” said Lt. “DOD’s cyber strategy was extremely reactive in nature and led U.S. economy and demand payments to hand back control. But that left openings for other infiltrations - those at civilian government agencies and ransomware cyberattacks in which criminals shut down the networks of private businesses essential to the U.S. ![]() You’re not going to get the Russians to stop spying.For decades, the Pentagon focused its Cyber Command defense operations on protecting U.S. “This is a reminder that espionage isn’t going away. “This spun up as SolarWinds spun down,” he said. Microsoft President Brad Smith called it "the largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen."īefore the SolarWinds campaign, the SVR was more widely known for spearphishing campaigns, making the USAID scam something of a return to form for the agency, said John Hultquist, the director of intelligence analysis at Mandiant, a cybersecurity company that also tracked the campaign. ![]() The SolarWinds attack, which was discovered late last year, involved hacking widely used software made by the Texas-based company and lead to the infiltration of at least nine federal agencies and dozens of companies. If users click the link, a malicious file gets installed in their system that allows Nobelium access to the compromised machines, Microsoft said.īurt said Microsoft detected the attack through the work of its threat intelligence center in tracking "nation-state actors." He wrote that the company has no reason to believe there is a vulnerability with its products or services. Phishing email appearing to come from USAID. On Tuesday, emails were sent that were meant to look like they were from USAID, including some that read "special alert" and "Donald Trump has published new documents on election fraud," Microsoft said. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Constant Contact said that the compromise of USAID’s account on its platform was “an isolated incident” and that the company has temporarily disabled accounts that may have been impacted. Nobelium, Burt said, accessed the USAID's account with Constant Contact, a mass-mailing service. "It is anticipated that additional activity may be carried out by the group using an evolving set of tactics," it said. Microsoft said in Thursday's blog that Nobelium's spearphishing campaign is ongoing. The email campaign has been going on since at least January and evolved over waves, it said in a separate blog post.
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