US cyberattack: Around 50 organizations ‘genuinely impacted’ with significant breach says FireEye

One of the largest cybersecurity companies in the US, FireEye said that the widespread hack of US government networks had genuinely impacted about 50 organizations.

Kevin Mandia CEO of FireEye said that even though 18,000 organizations had malicious code in their networks, it was 50 of them that had suffered major impact and security breaches. Some of the affected organizations include the US Treasury and departments of homeland security, state, and defense among others.

It was reported that hackers installed malware on the software used by the US Treasury and Commerce Departments and this allowed them to view internal email traffic. Department of Energy said that it was hit due to the cyberattack but also said that it was able to disconnect the systems from its network.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had said that Russians were behind this attack. Similar remarks were said by the chairs of the Senate and House of Representatives’ intelligence committees. However, President Donald Trump tends to disagree as said in two tweets. Instead, he claimed that China was behind the attack and not Russia.

Pompeo said that Russia was involved in the major cyberattacks on the federal agencies of the country. After the White House flagged a cyberattack that had been impacting the government agencies for several months.

Recently, Pompeo told the Mark Levin Show that there was a significant effort to use third-party software to embed the foreign code inside the systems. Therefore, the US Secretary of State concluded that the extra effort indicates Russians being involved in the activity.