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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday it was clear that Russia was behind the widespread hacking of government systems that officials this week called “a grave risk” to the United States.
Mr. Pompeo is the first member of the Trump administration to publicly link the Kremlin to the cyberattack, which used a variety of sophisticated tools to infiltrate dozens of government and private systems, including nuclear laboratories, the Pentagon, and the Treasury and Commerce Departments.
“I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,” Mr. Pompeo said in an interview on “The Mark Levin Show.”
“This was a very significant effort,” he said, adding that “we’re still unpacking precisely what it is.”
President Trump has yet to address the attack, which has been underway since spring and was detected by the private sector only a few weeks ago. Until Friday, Mr. Pompeo had played down the episode as one of the many daily attacks on the federal government.
But intelligence agencies have told Congress that they believe it was carried out by the S.V.R., an elite Russian intelligence agency.
As evidence of the attack’s scope piled up this week, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent out an urgent warning on Thursday that the hackers had “demonstrated an ability to exploit software supply chains and shown significant knowledge of Windows networks.”
The agency added that it was likely that some of the attackers’ tactics, techniques and procedures had “not yet been discovered.” Investigators say it could take months to unravel the extent to which American networks and the technology supply chain have been compromised.
Microsoft said it had identified 40 companies, government agencies and think tanks that the hackers had infiltrated. Nearly half are private technology firms, Microsoft said, many of them cybersecurity firms, like FireEye, that are charged with securing vast sections of the public and private sector.
“There are more nongovernmental victims than there are governmental victims, with a big focus on I.T. companies, especially in the security industry,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said in an interview on Thursday.
The national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, cut short a trip to the Middle East and Europe on Tuesday and returned to Washington to run crisis meetings to assess the situation. The F.B.I., the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence formed an urgent response group, the Cyber Unified Coordination Group, to coordinate the government’s responses to what the agencies called a “significant and ongoing cybersecurity campaign.”
The Russians have denied any involvement. The Russian ambassador to the United States, Anatoly I. Antonov, said Wednesday that there were “unfounded attempts by the U.S. media to blame Russia” for the recent cyberattacks.
According to a person briefed on the attack, the S.V.R. hackers sought to hide their tracks by using American internet addresses that allowed them to conduct attacks from computers in the very city — or appearing so — in which their victims were based. They created special bits of code intended to avoid detection by American warning systems and timed their intrusions not to raise suspicions.
The attacks, said the person briefed on the matter, shows that the weak point for the American government computer networks remains administrative systems, particularly ones that have a number of private companies working under contract.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Thursday that his administration would impose “substantial costs” on those responsible.
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