Testimony at the hearing included Sudhakar Ramakrishna, the new CEO of SolarWinds, who took over weeks after the breach was discovered and has since withdrawn from the intruder. He informed the Senate Committee that the Code had been removed from the company’s products. However, this is of little use to government agencies and companies that have already been breached, as the hackers can roam free once they are on their target computer networks.
Mr Ramakrishna also said that SolarWinds is still unclear how the Russian hackers got into the software they developed and embedded themselves there as early as fall 2019. When asked about the possibility of JetBrains making software tools, which will speed development and testing, Mr. Ramakrishna said there is still no evidence. The New York Times reported in January that an investigation was underway against JetBrains, but the company’s officers, some of whom are Russian, said there was no evidence.
Mr Smith, who has called for a “Geneva Digital Convention” that would create standards that preclude some types of attack, estimated that “at least a thousand very skilled, capable engineers” were involved in the hacking.
“This was an act of ruthlessness in my opinion,” he said, as it infected thousands of systems that the Russians had no interest in giving them access to only a few. “It was done in a very indiscriminate way.”
Mr Warner, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, the senior Republican on the committee, and others repeatedly stated that Amazon – which runs the CIA’s network cloud services and seeks other major federal contracts – was the only company that refused to join Sending senior executives to explain his role in hacking. Amazon has not publicly said anything about what it knew about the command and control operation performed by its servers in the United States.
This is a critical problem as the hackers seem to have understood that American intelligence agencies are prohibited from investigating network activity in the United States. By initiating the attack within American borders, they took advantage of domestic privacy to avoid being detected.
Several senators said they were concerned that once such a technique was known, it would be widely used by others. “The basic question is how we missed that and what are still missing.” Mr Rubio said.
Comments are closed.