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.)