On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo became the first official in the administration of President Donald Trump to blame Russia for a massive and ongoing cybersecurity attack on the U.S. government and private sector companies. Meanwhile, Trump has said little to nothing, continuing his long and suspicious pattern of never criticizing the Russian government.
The attack, conducted by the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (or SVR RF) hit the U.S. Treasury, Commerce, Justice and State Departments, all five branches of the U.S. military, the Pentagon, NASA, the Executive Office of the President and the National Security Agency, as well as the top 10 U.S. telecommunications companies and other “consulting, technology, telecom, and oil and gas companies in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.”
The Russian state hackers accomplished this by slipping through vulnerabilities in the Orion network monitoring software from SolarWinds, a U.S. company offering information technology monitoring and management tools, The Washington Post reports.
“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,” said Pompeo in a Friday interview with “The Mark Levin Show.”
However, Trump has said jack about the attacks while he touts the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine and continues to claim, without any legal evidence whatsoever, that widespread voter fraud caused him to lose the presidential election.
Rather, Trump has claimed that the cyberattack isn’t as bad as the media claims — he made the same accusation about the media’s treatment of coronavirus. He has also said that the attack may have come from China and may have targeted voting machines, even though there’s no evidence of either. These comments are literally all he has said on the matter.
“The problem is there’s not even been condemnation from the top,” Chris Painter, State Department cyber coordinator in the Obama administration said. President Trump hasn’t wanted to say anything bad to Russia, which only encourages them to act irresponsibly across a wide range of activities. [At the very least,] you’d want to make clear to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin that this is unacceptable — the scope is unacceptable.”