According to Ron Wyden, senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, the true extent is still unknow
Dozens of US Treasury Department email accounts have been hacked in a hacking attack. This was reported by Reuters on Monday evening, citing Ron Wyden (from Oregon), senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.
The true extent is still unknown, according to a lawmaker who attended a briefing for committee members. “The finance ministry is still unaware of all the actions of the hackers or exactly what information was stolen,” the agency quoted the senator as saying. Meanwhile, there is no evidence of the hacking of taxpayers’ information, according to the Internal Revenue Service, which is under its jurisdiction.
It has been learnt earlier that SolarWinds’ Orion software was hacked back in March this year. Cyber criminals managed to inject a virus into the Orion update, which was then downloaded and used by thousands of SolarWinds customers, among them leading government agencies as well as more than 400 major US firms. In a joint statement on 16 December, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and the Infrastructure and Cyber Security Agency said they had detected a serious attack on federal government computer networks.
U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, in an interview with U.S. journalist Mark Levin on December 18, outlined the theory that Russia was involved in the attack. US President Donald Trump said the next day that the media had exaggerated the extent of the incident. He disagreed with some media reports that a group of hackers working for Moscow could have been behind the cyber attack and instead suggested that China could have been involved.