'We must retaliate': Acting Intelligence Committee Chair Marco Rubio says the US should hit back with 'more than just sanctions' after Pompeo confirms Russia WAS behind the cyber attack branded an 'act of war' by senator
# Marco Rubio, acting chair of Senate intel committee, demanded retaliation
# Rubio said that the hack should be punished with more than sanctions
# Trump is yet to acknowledge the hack, which affected swathes of government
# Mike Pompeo on Friday became the first to publicly blame Russia for the hack
# The Pentagon, FBI, Homeland Security and Treasury were all targeted
# Russia has denied being behind the hack, which was carried out over months
Marco Rubio has demanded that the United States retaliate with more than sanctions for a massive cyber attack on the Pentagon, FBI and nuclear programs, which he said was likely carried out by Russia.
On Friday Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State, became the first U.S. official to publicly attribute a massive hacking campaign to Russia, after broad swathes of the federal government and private sector were revealed to be compromised.
Later on Friday night Rubio, the acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged a strong response.
But the huge security breach, which is believed to have begun in the spring and gone undetected for months, is thought to have been so sophisticated that only a state-sponsored actor could pull it off.
The Russians are automatically the prime suspect for attacks of this scale and audacity.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the attack compromised federal agencies' 'critical infrastructure' in a manner that was hard to detect and will be difficult to undo.
It means that calculating the true size of the attack will be difficult.
'CISA has determined that this threat poses a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations,' they said on Thursday.
'CISA expects that removing this threat actor from compromised environments will be highly complex and challenging for organizations.'
Pompeo on Friday confidently pointed the finger at the Russians.
'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,' Pompeo told The Mark Levin Show on Friday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman has denied Kremlin involvement, and the Russian embassy said in a statement that the country 'does not conduct offensive operations in the cyber domain.'
The sprawling attack, which went undetected for nearly nine months, compromised the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, State and Energy, as well as a growing list of companies and local governments across the country.
Officials with the nation's cybersecurity agency warn that the breach could be difficult to undo, saying the hackers 'demonstrated sophistication and complex tradecraft' and that it was likely that they had built additional secret backdoors while active inside the compromised networks.
Experts say there simply are not enough skilled threat-hunting teams to properly identify all the government and private-sector systems that may have been hacked, and warn infected networks may have to be 'burned to the ground' and rebuilt from scratch.
Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Saturday, December 19th 2020 at 8:51PM
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