Communications of the ACM
After Russian Cyberattack, Looking for Answers and Debating Retaliation
Senators and corporate executives warned the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday that the scope and scale of Russia's cyberattack on U.S. government and corporations were unclear and might still be continuing.
Credit: Drew Angerer
With President Biden's aides struggling to find innovative ways to retaliate against Russia for the most sophisticated hacking of government and corporations in history, key senators and corporate executives warned on Tuesday that the "scope and scale" of the operation were unclear, and that the attack might still be continuing.
"Who knows the entirety of what happened here?" Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, told the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. "Right now, the attacker" — which appears to be the S.V.R., one of Russia's main intelligence agencies — "is the only one who knows the entirety of what they did." Microsoft was one of the first to raise the alarm about the intrusion into networks across the government and private sector.
The hearing was a rare public airing of one of the biggest failures of American intelligence since Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: an assault on the "supply chain" of network management software used by governments and most of the nation's largest companies.
The National Security Agency, despite spending billions of dollars planting sensors in networks around the world, missed the evidence for more than a year — a point made by Democratic and Republican senators, who asked how long the United States would have remained in the dark.
From The New York Times
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