criminals and from the government space. now what we are hearing from the biden space, they re banding together with key al lice, japan and others to call out china for all kinds of malicious cyber activity. the first thing they re saying is china was responsible for a major hack revealed back in march micro soflt exchange servers impacked tens of thousands computers around the world. with high confidence they re say this was china-backed groups that carried out these hacks. the second perhaps more explosive part of this is that they re saying that china has been carrying out a campaign of essentially what are financial cyber crimes that they hired criminal cyber hackers to work for the civilian intelligence arm known as the mss, ministry of state security. and that they have been going out and doing all kinds of things, extortion, something called crypto jacking. and ransom ware attacks which is something we have talked about
dual factor authentication is one of them. storing things in the cloud is another one. now the biden administration is working very closely with the private sector to make sure that all these vulnerabilities are essentially being patched and are being secured. especially when it comes to making sure that our critical infrastructure is secured. we have seen recently two major ransomware attacks against russian officials against jbs foods, the colonial pipeline. what you re seeing together is the private sector and the administration coming together to try to make sure these kinds of vulnerabilities often called 0 day vulnerabilities are no longer being able to be exploited. the trouble is they do a lousy job, right? u.s. does lousy defense, clearly, because it s happening all the time. one natural vulnerability is so of our critical infrastructure is in private hands. colonial pipeline you can call critical infrastructure, the northeast ran out of gas. but it s in private hands.
diplomatic channels and we ll want to see what fruit those bear. these attacks are happening every day someplace in this country. some are big and well-known like colognial and some are below th radar. some may pay and rebuild networks and unfortunately, that will continue. i m not aware of significant ransom ware attacks that have happened in the last two weeks but we should not be surprised if they do. i remember recently the energy secretary told jake tapper my colleague that the russians are in the u.s. power grid. you hear that and it s pretty scary to hear that. what does that mean and what is the likelihood they would actually launch an attack on the u.s. power grid? so we know that multiple nation states want to target our critical infrastructure to hold it as risk at a time and place of their choosing. we assume that would likely be in the event of some type of