US government agencies have been ordered to scour their networks for malware and disconnect potentially compromised servers after authorities learned that the treasury and commerce departments were hacked in a months-long global cyberespionage campaign discovered when a prominent cybersecurity firm learned it had been breached.
In a rare emergency directive issued late on Sunday, the US Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) cybersecurity arm warned of an “unacceptable risk” to the executive branch from a feared large-scale penetration of US government agencies that could date back to mid-year or earlier.
“This can turn into one of the most impactful espionage campaigns on record,” cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The hacked cybersecurity company, FireEye, would not say who it suspected — many experts believe the operation is Russian given the careful tradecraft — and noted that foreign governments and major corporations were also compromised.
News of the hacks, first reported by Reuters, came less than a week after FireEye disclosed that nation-state hackers had broken into its network and stolen the company’s own hacking tools.
The apparent conduit for the treasury and commerce department hacks — and the FireEye compromise — is a hugely popular piece of server software called SolarWinds.
It is used by hundreds of thousands of organizations globally, including most Fortune 500 companies and multiple US federal agencies, which would now be scrambling to patch up their networks, said Alperovitch, the former chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
The DHS directive said that US agencies should immediately disconnect or power down any machines running the impacted SolarWinds software.
FireEye, without naming any specific targets, said in a blog post that its investigation into the hack of its own network had identified “a global campaign” targeting governments and the private sector that, beginning in the spring, had slipped malware into a SolarWinds software update.
Neither the company nor the US government publicly identified Russian state-backed hackers as responsible.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov yesterday said that Russia had “nothing to do with” the hacking.
“Once again, I can reject these accusations,” Peskov told reporters. “If for many months the Americans couldn’t do anything about it, then, probably, one shouldn’t unfoundedly blame the Russians for everything.”
The malware gave the hackers remote access to victims’ networks, and Alperovitch said SolarWinds grants “God-mode” access to a network, making everything visible.
FireEye said it had confirmed infections in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East, including in the healthcare and oil and gas industry — and had been informing affected customers around the world in the past few days.
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