According to sources, Russian
government hackers are believed to be monitoring the US Treasury’s internal email monitoring and Commerce department, and they fear that there’s
more to this troubling suspicion.

Apparently, this hack
is serious to the extent that it led to a National Security Council meeting at
the White House on Saturday. Everybody, including the US officials, is keeping
the matter hushed and isn’t publicizing any discovery. However, the Commerce
Department did confirm that there was a breach at one of the agencies and they
had requested the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as well as
the FBI to investigate the matter.

John Ullyot, who is the
spokesman for the National Security Council, said that the department is taking
all the precautions and necessary steps to find the culprits and any remedy
that could possibly dissolve the entire situation.

Although there’s no
guaranteed identification, three people closely working in the investigation
have claimed that Russians are the ones responsible for the attack.

In
addition, two people have claimed that the breaches are related to abroad
campaign, which also includes the recently FireEye hack, a
renowned cybersecurity company that works with the US government and other
commercial contracts.

Of course, the Russian
foreign minister has refused to accept these serious allegations and has
claimed that these theories are based on unfound evidence and are simply an
attempt from the US government to blame Russia for the attack.

Hack Microsoft’s Linux OS and earn upto $100,000!

The latest update
reveals that cyber spies have also joined the government in this task and have
tampered the updates that are released by the IT company SolarWind.

If you
don’t know this, SolarWind works for the government customers and military.
This trick is known as supply chain attack and it works interestingly in order
to hide the malicious code in the body of a legitimate software update that is
requested by third parties.

An Austin-based company
released a statement on Sunday, claiming that a Texas-based company updated its
monitoring software that was released between March and June this year, and it
may have contributed to this highly sophisticated targeted manual supply chain
attack by a nation state.

The company, of course,
didn’t say anything after that controversial statement. Furthermore, the diversity
of SolarWind’s customer base has led to a major concern within the US
intelligence, as they believe other government agencies might also be at
risk. 

SolarWind has posted on
its website that its customers are some of America’s Fortune 500 companies
along with top 10 US telecommunications providers. It also caters to the all
five branches of the US military, the state department, the National Security
Agency, and most significantly, the office of the President of the United
States.

 Huge Cyber Espionage Campaign

The breach is a
critical challenge for the President-elect Joe Biden’s new administration as
officials continue to investigate this mater. And unfortunately, most cyber
investigation of this scale take months and sometimes years before reaching to a conclusion.

According to one of the investigation’s spokesperson, the entire incident is a way bigger story than if we think of one single agency. In other words, it is a big campaign of cyber espionage that is targeting the United States’ government as well as its interests.

Hackers broke into the
NTIA’s office software, Microsoft’s Office 365. Hence, emails of all the staff
members were monitored for months without anyone noticing. When we requested
the Microsoft team to comment on this matter, it failed to respond.

It is believed that the
hackers are smart as well as highly sophisticated and possess successfully tricked Microsoft’s
authentication control program.

Nobody from the
government has provided the breach’s full scope. It is believed that the
investigation is still in its primary stages and includes a couple of different
federal agencies, like the FBI.

One spokesperson for
the Infrastructure Security and Cybersecurity Agency has said that they’ve been
working closely and collaboratively with agency partners and are trying to track the activity possibly happening on government networks.

Not to mention, CISA is offering technical assistance to the entities
impacted as they continue their mission to identify potential compromises.   

Ever since the news
broke, social media and news outlets have #RussianHackersTreasury
trending worldwide because the consequence of Russian government hacking can
be severe and global. We wonder if this has anything to do with Mr. Ratcliffe
and the BlackEnergy.

The FBI and US National
Security Agency haven’t responded to our queries.

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