President Donald Trump responded to the massive cyber attack against the United States that was detected last week by suggesting that the culprit might be China, not Russia.
“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control. Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!).”
Trump’s comments come after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is the former CIA director, told author and radio host Mark Levin that U.S. intelligence showed that the attack was “pretty clearly” an attack by the Russians.
“I can’t say much more as we’re still unpacking precisely what it is, and I’m sure some of it will remain classified,” Pompeo stated, later adding: “This was a very significant effort, and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”
When Levin asked Pompeo if Trump had been silent on the issue because there is a lot going on behind the scenes that could not be discussed because it was classified, Pompeo responded, “That’s absolutely true.”
“I saw this in my time running the world’s premier espionage service at the CIA,” Pompeo said. “There are many things that you’d very much love to say, ‘Boy, I’m going to call that out,’ but a wiser course of action to protect the American people is to calmly go about your business and defend freedom.”
While many of the president’s critics attacked him Trump for downplaying the scale of the attack, it is worth noting that those same critics would likely attack him had he come out and sounded the alarm about the severity of the attack because his remarks would likely be used in foreign propaganda by America’s enemies.
Sources familiar with the matter told Yahoo News on Friday that they believe the hackers conducted a dry run attack in October 2019 as the country was largely focused on the Democrats’ impeachment of Trump.
“We’re thinking they wanted to test whether or not it was going to work and whether it would be detected. So it was more or less a dry run,” a source familiar with the investigation told Yahoo News. “They took their time. They decided to not go out with an actual backdoor right away. That signifies that they’re a little bit more disciplined and deliberate.”
The attack infiltrated numerous U.S. government departments and agencies, including those tasked with monitoring the nation’s nuclear weapons.
The New York Times reported:
Over the past few years, the United States government has spent tens of billions of dollars on cyberoffensive abilities, building a giant war room at Fort Meade, Md., for United States Cyber Command, while installing defensive sensors all around the country — a system named Einstein to give it an air of genius — to deter the nation’s enemies from picking its networks clean, again.
It now is clear that the broad Russian espionage attack on the United States government and private companies, underway since spring and detected by the private sector only a few weeks ago, ranks among the greatest intelligence failures of modern times.
Einstein missed it — because the Russian hackers brilliantly designed their attack to avoid setting it off. The National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security were looking elsewhere, understandably focused on protecting the 2020 election.