SolarWinds Corp banner hanging on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on the day of the company’s initial public offering in New York, USA, October 19, 2018.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
The United States is preparing to take action against Russia after concluding that it was probably involved in a major cyber attack that affected government systems and national companies, the New York Times reported on Sunday. The move comes as the Biden government begins to deal with the revelation of another allegedly state-sponsored attack that appears to come from China.
The White House has confirmed that it will take “a combination of actions” in response to Russia’s cyber attack, although it did not provide details on when and how it would do it.
“As we already said, we will be responding to Solar[W]”Inds hack with a mix of seen and unseen actions,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement to CNBC. “We will not publicly discuss certain aspects of our response.”
The United States is recovering from the attack discovered just a few months ago by IT company SolarWinds. American officials said they believed the Russians were behind the breach, which impacted several government agencies that use the technology.
The first US action could take place in the next three weeks, unnamed officials told the Times, and start a series of actions in Russia that should be noted by President Vladimir Putin and his intelligence team, but not by the public. The United States would also take steps to impose economic sanctions and President Joe Biden would sign an executive order to strengthen government networks, officials said.
The news comes days after Microsoft released a major new breach of its hacking-related services in China. A source familiar with the U.S. government’s response told Reuters on Friday that more than 20,000 American organizations were compromised during the attack. The US investigation found that city governments and credit unions were among those affected, according to Reuters. Microsoft did not reveal the exact scope of the attacks, but initially said they were “limited and targeted”.
Read the full story in The New York Times.
– CNBC’s Eamon Javers contributed to this report.
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