Robert O Brien cuts short overseas trip in wake of cyberattack Follow Us
Question of the Day By Lauren Toms - The Washington Times - Wednesday, December 16, 2020
White House National Security Adviser Robert C. O’Brien this week cut short a valedictory tour of European capitals, according to multiple reports, as he returned to Washington to grapple with the repercussions of a global cyberespionage campaign that hacked into the systems of multiple U.S. government agencies.
Government investigators and private security analysts have said Russia is behind the hack, a charge the Kremlin has denied.
Mr. O’Brien is heading an emergency interagency push to assess the extent of the breach. Officials told The Associated Press he was originally set to spend the entire week traveling, and was forced to scrub stops in Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Britain.
“We see this even more strongly from the Chinese Communist Party, from the North Koreans as well,” Pompeo said. “It’s an ongoing battle, an ongoing struggle to keep our systems safe, and I’m very confident the United States Government will keep our classified information out of the hands of these bad actors.”
The federal government began its response to the attacks over the past weekend, with the months-long espionage effort discovered as part of investigation into the breach of cybersecurity company FireEye that was announced last week.
Bloomberg News reported Tuesday that National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien had cut short a trip to the Middle East and Europe to return to the U.S. and address the massive cybersecurity incident, and that O’Brien planned to convene “high-level” meetings to respond to the attack over the next few days.
While President Donald Trump keeps claiming with no evidence that computers were programmed to switch votes and alter the outcome of the election, he has so far said nothing about a real hack launched by Russia’s foreign intelligence service that experts call one of the widest, most sophisticated, and potentially most damaging in years.
The attack penetrated at least five U.S. government agencies and 18,000 other users of the Orion network management system, manufactured by a privately traded company called SolarWinds. Those five agencies the departments of State, Homeland Security, Commerce, and Treasury, and the National Institutes of Health are the only ones so far identified as victims of the hack, though there may have been others. (Ironically, one mission of Homeland Security is to protect the nation from cyberattacks.)