US cybersecurity agency warns of 'grave' threat from hack

[dalton99a]

16. +1. Dick Durbin called it "a declaration of war by Russia on the United States"

Stanford University cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos said there aren’t nearly enough qualified threat hunters globally to scour potentially infected organizations for hidden malware from the operation.

“We are going to be reaping an ‘iron harvest’ of second-stage malware for years from this one,” he tweeted, a reference to unexploded World War II bombs that continue to be found in Europe three-quarters of century later.

Tom Kellermann, cybersecurity strategy chief of the software company VMware, said the hackers are now “omniscient to the operations” of federal agencies they’ve infiltrated “and there is viable concern that they might leverage destructive attacks within these agencies” now that they’ve been discovered.

Among the business sectors scrambling to protect their systems and assess potential theft of information are defense contractors, technology companies and providers of telecommunications and the electric grid.