CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed former DHS Cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs over the implications of Russia’s cyberattack against the U.S., a...
CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed former DHS Cybersecurity chief Chris Krebs over the implications of Russia’s cyberattack against the U.S., and why the government wasn’t able to stop it.
Krebs spoke to Tapper on State of the Union, where he agreed with America’s intel community and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that Russia was behind the espionage effort. This comes after President Donald Trump deflected blame to China and snarked at the media coverage on how Russia was responsible for the attack.
Tapper began by having Krebs assess the threat level of the cyberattack, which prompted the latter to warn that more organizations might have been affected than what is publicly known. The CNN anchor noted that House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff recently said agencies will have to explain “why didn’t you catch this,” so Tapper reframed that as a question for Krebs.
“I think there are three contributing factors here,” Krebs answered.
First is, again, the Russians, the SVR, are very, very good at what they do. The second is this supply chain compromise, this third-party trusted supply chain attack, that is a particularly hard attack vector to defend against. The third is that the federal civilian agencies, the 101 civilian agencies are not really optimized for defense right now. What that means is there is a lot of old, antiquated, legacy IT Systems that are hard to defend.
Since Krebs said that his old DHS branch, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is awaiting the funding to let them counteract Russian infiltration, Tapper asked him “Was this a failure of CISA, a failure of U.S. Cyber Command?”
“Yeah, it happened on my watch,” Krebs admitted. “We missed it. A bunch of other folks missed it. But there is work to do now going forward to make sure A: we get past this, that we get the Russians out of the networks, but, B: that it never happens again.”
Watch above, via CNN.
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