Mike Pompeo Says Hack Was ‘Pretty Clearly’ Russia

In an interview on Friday night, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he suspects Russia was behind the hack on the software company SolarWinds that has affected several US government agencies.

“I can’t say much more as we’re still unpacking precisely what it is, and I’m sure some of it will remain classified,” Pompeo said. “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.”

While many in the media and Congress were quick to pin the blame on Moscow without evidence, Pompeo is the first Trump administration official to do so. The cybersecurity firm FireEye, Microsoft, and the US government are currently investigating the cyberattack, but so far, they have not attributed blame.

Earlier this week, an executive from FireEye said the firm has not yet seen “sufficient evidence” to name the actor responsible. On Thursday, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency put out an alert that said the actor responsible likely has “tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that have not yet been discovered,”

TTPs is a way the US government usually blames Russia for breaching servers. Federal agencies often say hackers used TTPs consistent with previous Russian government activity, offering that assessment as the only proof to substantiate claims of Russian hacking.

New TTPs suggests the investigators have less of a grip on who carried out the cyberattack than usual. Either way, attributing cyber activity is extremely difficult, as hackers use tools to disguise themselves.

Another way some are assuming the Russians are responsible is the sophistication of the hack. But a security expert speaking to Reuters said he warned SolarWinds in 2019 that the company’s update server could be easily accessed since the password was “solarwinds123.”

“This could have been done by any attacker, easily,” Security expert Vinoth Kumar told Reuters.