Former American security official: Poisonous policies opened the door for Russian pirates
Fiona Hill raises a warning cry against repeated Russian interference in the elections.
From the source
A picture of the Ministry of Homeland Security, which was also subjected to the cyber attack.
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When the former official in the US National Security Council, concerned with the affairs of the former Soviet Union and Europe, Fiona Hill, testified at the impeachment hearings of President Donald Trump, last year, she issued a stark warning that Russian interference in the 2016 US elections will be repeated, Hill said. : "The Russian security services and their agents prepared to repeat their interference in the 2020 elections," and added, "We are running out of time to prevent them."
Her call was directed at America's leaders, and the president in particular, to stop politicizing Russian cyber interference, and unite in order to deal with it seriously, but her call went unheeded.
Russia did not launch a significant cyber operation to interfere in the presidential election, and instead, as it was revealed last week, it exploited the focus on voting to carry out a massive spying operation against large sections of the US government.
Hill was frustrated, but was not surprised by the breakthrough. "It's the oldest trick in the book," said the Russian expert. "We are always dealing with the last attack. We might have been focused on elections, so while we were focusing on securing one home, they were moving around." To another home ».
The size and intensity of the recent Russian operation shocked even some of the most experienced Internet observers. Intelligence analysts believe that the operation was carried out by an elite unit of Russian intelligence known as (SVR). It infiltrated government and private computer systems, by penetrating a company called "Solar Wind". That makes important network monitoring software used by the government and many large American companies.
The malware planted by SVR is believed to have infected this program since March. Microsoft identified 40 companies, government agencies, and research centers that had been compromised, and were eventually discovered by FireEye, a cybersecurity company, earlier this month. .
A Russian operation of this scale raises all kinds of questions: Why was America not prepared?
Did the Trump administration throw the ball to Russia?
How should the next Biden administration respond?
Some hawks in US foreign policy are demanding US retaliation. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton called for "appropriate retaliation to re-establish deterrence," and Republican Senator Marco Rubio said: "America should take revenge, not just by imposing sanctions."
However, cybersecurity experts emphasized that although this breach was done in an unusual manner, it is a permanent feature of modern governance, and it appears so far that no highly classified material has been hacked, although it is believed that the breach It has infiltrated government systems, including the Nuclear Laboratories, the Department of Defense (Pentagon), the Treasury and the Department of Commerce.
"We shouldn't call it an attack," said Johns Hopkins University cybersecurity expert Thomas Reid, "but it seems like an intelligence gathering process. Russia is very good at this, and maybe better than we thought, but we do a lot of the same things." It's a particularly well-executed spying campaign, but the real question is: Why did it take nine months to uncover it?
Why did no US government agency discover the breach?
It would be wise to think about this. ”
Hill hopes that the breakthrough will be a wake-up call. "America has underestimated the Russians," she said, but "the people who work in this field did not underestimate them, but they were surprised."
Hill blames a lot of the toxic party policies that Trump has inflated, and said, "The president has focused on his own interests, and underestimated the people who are supposed to keep these systems safe," referring to his recent dismissal of America's director of cybersecurity, Chris Krebs, and resented Trump from him for not supporting his theory of the conspiracy to rig the elections, and Hill added: "All the internal fighting that we are going through, the continuous dismissal of officials, and our being obsessed with describing Russian interference in the elections as a hoax, and a lot of corruption, favoritism and incompetence of those around Trump, did not help us with anything." And she goes on, saying, "The United States must pay attention to unifying its work and following a strict and coherent approach. We have let the White House do something different that we have not seen before, by preventing officials from doing their work."
Hill indicated that the Democrats were also wrong with their comprehensive attack on Trump's presidency, they are also responsible, as they described Trump as illegitimate, and Putin elected him. The Democrats put him on the defensive.
Trump has focused on his own interests, and has underestimated the people who are supposed to keep these systems safe.
• Russia did not launch an important electronic operation to interfere in the presidential elections, but it took advantage of the focus on voting to carry out a massive espionage operation against large sectors of the US government.
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