Trump Downplays Suspected Russia-led Hack

U.S. President Donald Trump is downplaying the severity of a massive cybersecurity breach by suspected Russian operatives that has exposed the networks of government agencies and private sector companies, contradicting the assertions of his secretary of state and lawmakers briefed on the matter.

After days of silence, Trump took to Twitter on Saturday for his first comments on the hack, which is thought to have impacted at least 18,000 customers of SolarWinds, a Texas-based software management company. Those affected include the Energy, Treasury and Commerce departments, as well as state and local governments.

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But unlike intelligence officials and lawmakers, who warned that damage from the breach was ongoing, the president said that “everything is well under control.”

“I have been fully briefed,” he wrote. “The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality.”

Trump also cast doubt on comments late Friday by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who said it appeared that Russia was responsible.

Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be China,” Trump said.

He also suggested the cyber breach might have impacted November’s presidential election, which he lost to former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.

“There could also have been a hit on our ridiculous voting machines during the election, which is now obvious that I won big, making it an even more corrupted embarrassment for the USA,” Trump added.

Less than 24 hours earlier, Pompeo told The Mark Levin Show that while intelligence agencies were still examining the hack, all evidence pointed to the Kremlin.

“This was a very significant effort, and I think it's the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,” Pompeo said.

U.S. intelligence and cybersecurity agencies have yet to make a formal attribution for the hack, which they said was under way at least as early as March.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI on Saturday declined to comment on Trump’s tweets, standing by a joint statement issued Wednesday, which described the hack only as part of a “significant and ongoing cybersecurity campaign.”

Since then, however, in a series of updated alerts, the cybersecurity unit of the U.S. Homeland Security Department — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — has warned that the problem was not contained to software from SolarWinds.

Other platforms

“CISA has evidence of initial access vectors other than the SolarWinds Orion platform,” one alert said, adding that the agency was investigating instances in which other platforms were used to access critical networks.

“This threat poses a grave risk to the federal government and state, local, tribal and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations,” CISA said. “This is a patient, well-resourced and focused adversary that has sustained long duration activity on victim networks.”

In the meantime, CISA’s former director answered some of the president’s Twitter allegations, rejecting the notion that the hack could have in any way changed the results of November’s presidential election.

“Do not conflate voting system security and SolarWinds,” said Christopher Krebs, who had played a leading role in the country’s election security efforts until Trump fired him last month, two weeks after American voters cast their ballots.