The top US cybersecurity official told lawmakers on Wednesday that the federal government is monitoring “widespread” hacking attempts using recently discovered vulnerabilities in a Microsoft email application, while researchers revealed that nearly one dozen hacking groups have used this flaw to attack a variety of organizations.
Brandon Wells, Acting Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), testified before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Homeland Security that previously unknown vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s email Exchange server have been exploited globally. .
Wells added that the agency “recognizes the widespread exploitation of vulnerabilities, and trusted partners have observed malicious actors using these vulnerabilities to reach specific organizations in the United States and around the world.”
Wells warned that once adversaries accessed an email server, “they could access and control a corporate network even after fixing security holes,” adding that the process could range from “stealing information to implementing physical attacks. of ransomware until the infrastructure is destroyed. ” “
Wells’s testimony came a week after the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an emergency directive directing all federal agencies to investigate signs of a violation and, if found, those involved must correct their security systems. immediate to avoid exploitation.
This move came shortly after Microsoft announced that a Chinese state-sponsored group of hackers known as “Hafnium” was using vulnerabilities to attack US organizations.
Eric Goldstein, the CIA’s deputy executive director for cybersecurity, testified Wednesday that while no U.S. federal agency has been confirmed to have been hacked due to the incident, the investigation is still ongoing.
“We are working with individual agencies to evaluate the results of their forensic analysis, and at this stage there are no federal civilian agencies that have been confirmed to have been violated,” Goldstein told the same House subcommittee.
While US federal agencies have not been violated due to these loopholes, thousands of other organizations have been compromised, and the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that as many as 250,000 groups may have been compromised across the world.
Cybersecurity group “FireEye” revealed in a blog it published last week that hackers have been on at least one customer system since January, and they have been chasing “retail stores in the United States, local governments, a university and an engineering company. “
And there are likely to be other international victims, as the National Internet and Information Security Office in the Czech Republic issued a statement on Friday, saying it was helping affected organizations.
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