Hacked networks must be ‘burned,’ rebuilt
It’s going to take months to kick elite hackers widely believed to be Russian out of the U.S. government networks they have been quietly rifling through since as far back as March in Washington’s worst cyberespionage failure on record.
Experts say there simply are not enough skilled threat-hunting teams to identify all the government and private-sector systems that may have been hacked. FireEye, the cybersecurity company that discovered the worst-ever intrusion into U.S. agencies and was among the victims, has already tallied dozens of casualties. It’s racing to identify more.
“We have a serious problem. We don’t know what networks they are in, how deep they are, what access they have, what tools they left,” said Bruce Schneier, a prominent security expert and Harvard fellow.
It’s not known exactly what the hackers were seeking, but experts say it could include nuclear secrets, blueprints for advanced weaponry and information for dossiers on key government and industry leaders.
That means many federal workers — and others in the private sector — will have to presume that unclassified networks are teeming with spies. Agencies will often have to conduct sensitive government business on Signal, WhatsApp and other encrypted smartphone apps.
“We should buckle up. This will be a long ride,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, cofounder and former chief technical officer of the leading cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. “Cleanup is just phase one.”
The only way to be sure a network is clean is “to burn it down to the ground and rebuild it,” Schneier said. It’s the only way to be sure an intruder is out.
Deputy White House press secretary Brian Morgenstern told reporters Friday that national security adviser Robert O’Brien has sometimes been leading multiple daily meetings with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence community, looking for ways to mitigate the hack.
He would not provide details, “but rest assured we have the best and brightest working hard on it each and every single day.”
What makes this hacking campaign so extraordinary is its scale — 18,000 organizations were infected from March to June by malicious code that piggybacked on popular network-management software from an Austin company called SolarWinds.
Only a sliver of those infections were activated. FireEye says it has identified dozens, all “high-value targets.” Microsoft, which has helped respond, says it has identified more than 40 government agencies, think tanks, government contractors, non-governmental organizations and technology companies infiltrated by the hackers, 80 percent of them in the United States.
SolarWinds’ customers include most prominent Fortune 500 companies.
The White House has been largely silent.