Trust is a transitive property, and threat actors know this, which is why they take advantage of it.” “As the Department of Defense continues to expand its trust in third-party products and services, because it has no choice, really, this will only get worse. government, writ large, are going to pay over and over for their continued and increasing reliance on, at its core, code that someone else wrote and tested on their network” (as opposed to code that they wrote and they tested), said Philip Reiner, CEO of the Institute for Security and Technology, who also formerly served at DoD and on the National Security Council. “This is just the price that the Department of Defense, the intelligence community and the U.S. With agencies just now unplugging from the platform, the extended time that hackers potentially had access to government emails and other information particularly alarmed experts. “We have standard operating procedures in place that are very refined when an intrusion is noted or a potential intrusion so that we can monitor our networks and counteract anything,” Miller said. Speaking with CBS News Tuesday night, Acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller said he hadn’t seen evidence of a compromise yet, adding “looking at it right now, don’t have anything definitive.” He said the department was continue to assess the damage. SolarWinds counts all five military services, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency among its clientele for the network management platform, and said Monday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the hack between March and June affected “fewer than” 18,000 customers - both government agencies and businesses.

As civilian agencies disconnected Monday from the SolarWinds’ Orion platform under government orders, the Department of Defense declined to comment on whether its systems are among those across several government agencies reportedly accessed by hackers affiliated with Russia’s foreign intelligence agency.

Russian hacking sites