Investigators are still trying to grasp the scope of the widespread hacking campaign targeting the U.S. government and private sector companies.
Since the news of the hack broke Sunday, the potential pool of victims had narrowed from SolarWinds’ 300,000 customers to a pool of about 18,000 that downloaded updates embedded with the attackers’ malware. But on Thursday, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency issued a warning: “The SolarWinds Orion supply chain compromise is not the only initial infection vector this APT actor leveraged.”
Microsoft notified 40 customers that “attackers targeted more precisely and compromised through additional and sophisticated measures,” the company's President Brad Smith wrote in a lengthy blog post published Thursday. The victims spanned different sectors: information technology (44%), government (18%), think tanks and nongovernmental organizations (18%), government contractors (9%) and other (11%). Though most are based in the U.S., the company also identified victims in seven other countries.
“This is not ‘espionage as usual,’ even in the digital age. Instead, it represents an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world. In effect, this is not just an attack on specific targets, but on the trust and reliability of the world’s critical infrastructure in order to advance one nation’s intelligence agency,” Smith wrote.
The number of known breaches keeps growing. The Energy Department Thursday confirmed networks—including the federal agency responsible for maintaining the U.S. nuclear stockpile—were breached.
The investigation remains ongoing, but DOE spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes said so far, “malware has been isolated to business networks only, and has not impacted the mission essential national security functions” Energy steers, in particular the National Nuclear Security Admini ..
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