US departments of treasury, commerce hit by massive hacking

WASHINGTON : US government agencies were 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 Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity arm warned of an “unacceptable risk” to the executive branch from a feared largescale 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,” said cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch.

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 organisations globally, including most Fortune 500 companies and multiple US federal agencies, which will now be scrambling to patch up their networks, said Alperovitch, the former chief technical officer of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

The DHS directive — only the fifth since they were created in 2015 — said US agencies should immediately disconnect or power down any machines running the impacted SolarWinds software.