Russia Launched Cyberattack Against U.S.
The Claim
Russia launched a cyberattack against the U.S. government.
News posted on
Emerging story
On December 14, 2020, Eric Geller, a Twitter user, shared a post stating “New: Inside the deepening crisis consuming the federal govt as agencies scramble to figure out if they've been hacked. 'This is probably going to be one of the most consequential cyberattacks in U.S. history,' a U.S. official told me.”
This tweet was in response to recent news regarding a Russian cyberattack on the United States.
The post received more than 1.9K retweets and 3K likes and several comments within a couple of days.
In response, many Twitter users expressed anger and alarm that they hadn’t heard of the news of this event shared across main media streams.
Misbar’s Analysis
Given the information researched and analyzed on this recent cyberattack, Misbar finds this claim to be true.
Many expert analysts and researchers firmly believe a Russian group known as the Cozy Bear or SVR can be accredited for an attack against the United States government. In what is known as a SolarWinds attack, this Russian group is believed to have launched this attack by leveraging a loophole within the SolarWinds platform. SolarWinds is a network performance monitoring tools used by hundreds of organizations to manage the availability, performance, and reporting of their network systems.
Analysis into all of the affected processes, organizations, and systems is still ongoing and developing. As such, many organizations around the U.S. that use the SolarWinds products have been analyzing their networks and logs to validate whether they’ve been affected. This includes several government agencies, schools, hospitals, and companies. One of the organizations adversely impacted that poses a grave danger to the welfare of the U.S. is the Treasury and Commerce Department.
Unfortunately, with security being so new for many organizations, many lack the ability to properly assess whether they’ve been impacted by the attack. This will therefore reduce the ability to properly notify all Americans that may have had their information compromised.
Misbar will monitor this story and provide updates on the data recorded on this claim.
