Contrary to the statements of President Donald Trump (74), US investigators have officially identified Russia as the alleged originator of the massive hacker attack on American authorities and companies.
According to previous knowledge, the aim of breaking into the data networks was to collect information, the Federal Police FBI and the NSA interception service announced in a joint statement.
The security authorities are clearly against Trump with their finding that “presumably” Russian hackers were at work. After the attack became known, the Republican claimed without any evidence that China could have been behind it.
IT security experts were convinced of the Russian trail right from the start, and Foreign Minister Mike Pompeo (57) and Justice Minister William Barr (70), who has since resigned, commented accordingly.
The large-scale attack was uncovered by the IT security company FireEye, which was itself a target of the hackers. The attackers had gained access to the networks using maintenance software from SolarWinds, which was used in many places, and had remained undetected for months.
An embarrassing setback for American security services!
While a total of around 18,000 customers were affected by SolarWinds, not all of them had suspicious activities in the networks afterwards, the statement said on Tuesday. Among them were fewer than ten US government agencies.
According to initial information, the hackers had broken into systems of the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Energy, among other things. One of the concerns afterwards was that they could have smuggled in attack software for attacks on the American power grid, for example.