Russian Hack of US Gov’t Far Worse Than Originally Reported

There is no denying that Vladimir Putin would like Russia to rule the world, and that he would do just about anything to further that goal.  This mean, at the current time, that he’s going to do everything in his power to destabilize the United States, as we are one of the last superpowers that has enough firepower to keep him in check.

Putin’s latest affront to America comes in the form of a hack of some of our government’s most important computer systems, and I.T. experts believe that the infiltration was far more detrimental than first reported.

A former Homeland Security adviser for the Trump administration is sounding the alarm on the months-long Russian hack of government agencies and corporations, saying the vastness of the intrusion is “hard to overstate.”

“The Russians have had access to a considerable number of important and sensitive networks for six to nine months,” Thomas Bossert wrote in an op-ed that ran Wednesday in the New York Times.

The Russian hacker group, he wrote, “surely have used its access to further exploit and gain administrative control over the networks it considered priority targets. For those targets, the hackers will have long ago moved past their entry point, covered their tracks and gained what experts call ‘persistent access,’ meaning the ability to infiltrate and control networks in a way that is hard to detect or remove.”

And then, grimly…

“The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate,” he said.

That wasn’t all:

“In the networks that the Russians control, they have the power to destroy or alter data, and impersonate legitimate people. Domestic and geopolitical tensions could escalate quite easily if they use their access for malign influence and misinformation — both hallmarks of Russian behavior,” Bossert said.

Putin’s ploys known no bounds, it seems, and the United States is running out of options when it comes to dealing with them.