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WASHINGTON, Feb 2 (Reuters) - Suspected Chinese hackers exploited a flaw in software made by SolarWinds Corp to help break into U.S. government computers last year, five people familiar with the matter told Reuters, marking a new twist in a sprawling cybersecurity breach that U.S. lawmakers have labeled a national security emergency.
Two people briefed on the case said FBI investigators recently found that the National Finance Center, a federal payroll agency inside the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was among the affected organizations, raising fears that data on thousands of government employees may have been compromised.
Biden s new federal CISO also has previous experience in government cyber security. He worked at the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 until 2015 as a cyber security strategist and then as advisor to the Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity before spending two years at the White House as the president’s senior cyber security advisor.
He left that role a few months after former President Trump took office, moving to a position at Ford Motor Company to look after enterprise vulnerability management and application security. After a year at Ford, he went to work for the state of Michigan, where he started as deputy chief security officer before taking the top role.
The company has not seen enough evidence to positively trace the hackers behind the ongoing SolarWinds Orion hack to Russian entities, a FireEye executive said.
The company has not seen enough evidence to positively trace the hackers behind the ongoing SolarWinds Orion hack to Russian entities, a FireEye executive said.
Rioters stormed the Capitol on Wednesday. (Photo: C-SPAN)
After the occupation of the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump rioters Wednesday, an emergency response plan to ensure federal computers were locked down apparently was not activated, some experts say. As a result, federal security teams are likely scrambling to detect and repair any damage done.
News reports about stolen computers as well as protesters occupying offices in which computers were left on are raising serious security concerns. I was very disappointed to see that the computers in [Speaker of the House] Nancy Pelosi s office were left on and were unlocked,” says retired Air Force Brigadier Gen. Gregory Touhill, former U.S. CISO and now CEO of Appgate Federal. “That is an incredibly poor security practice. You would have thought that they would have unplugged them as they evacuated the offices.