Hackers broke into the networks of the Treasury and Commerce departments as part of a monthslong global cyberespionage campaign revealed Sunday, just days after the prominent cybersecurity firm FireEye said it had been breached in an attack that industry experts said bore the hallmarks of Russian tradecraft.
In response to what may be a large-scale penetration of US government agencies, the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity arm issued an emergency directive calling on all federal civilian agencies to scour their networks for compromises.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
The threat apparently came from the same cyberespionage campaign that has afflicted FireEye, foreign governments and major corporations, and the FBI was investigating.
"This can turn into one of the most impactful espionage campaigns on record," said cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch.
News of the hacks, first reported by Reuters, came less than a week after FireEye disclosed that foreign government hackers had broken into its network and stolen the company's own hacking tools. Many experts suspect Russia is responsible. FireEye's customers include federal, state and local governments and top global corporations.
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 organizations globally, including most Fortune 500 companies and multiple US federal agencies that 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.
FireEye, without naming any specific targets, said in a blog post that its investigation into the hack of its own network had identified "a global campaign" targeting governments and the private sector that, beginning in the spring, had slipped malware into a SolarWinds software update. Neither the company nor US government officials would not say whether it believed Russian state-backed hackers were responsible.
The malware gave the hackers remote access to victims' networks, and Alperovitch said SolarWinds grants "God-mode" access to a network, making everything visible.
"We anticipate this will be a very large event when all the information comes to light," John Hultquist, director of threat analysis at FireEye, said. "The actor is operating stealthily, but we are certainly still finding targets that they manage to operate in."
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
