Alyza Sebenius (Bloomberg) -- The suspected Russian hackers that attacked U.S. companies and government agencies were interested in accessing “sensitive but unclassified communications” mostly stored on Microsoft Corp. products, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s top cybersecurity official.
Brandon Wales, the acting director of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in a speech on Wednesday that the massive hacking operation was believed to be “a long-term intelligence gathering operation” that was largely designed to compromise and gain access to the communications “primarily housed online in Microsoft Office 365 cloud environments from its victims.”
Wales’s comments provided new detail into an attack that was first disclosed in December. The hackers, who U.S. officials believe are associated with the Russian government, inserted malicious code into widely used software from Texas-based SolarWinds Corp. in order to break into company and government networks. SolarWinds has said that as many as 18,000 customers received an update containing the malicious code though it is believed that a relatively small fragment were targeted for further infiltration by the hackers.
In addition, the hackers used other means besides SolarWinds’s software to breach victims’ computers. Wales has previously said that about 30% of private-sector and government victims didn’t run the affected SolarWinds’s software, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“SolarWinds was one of the ways in which the ..
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