Trump Has Yet to Address Massive SolarWinds Hack of the U S Government

A massive hack on the federal government presents President Donald Trump with the same choice Barack Obama faced in the waning days of his tenure: whether to impose sanctions on Russia, and how severe to make them. So far, Trump has shown little willingness to impose costs.

Confronted with evidence that Vladimir Putin’s government-orchestrated cyberattacks aimed at interfering with the 2016 election, Obama levied sanctions against Russia’s intelligence services and expelled 35 diplomats.

Now, it’s Trump’s turn to decide whether to call out and punish the Kremlin, as Obama did, or go easy on the Russian president and leave it to President-elect Joe Biden to formulate a response to a hack so serious it prompted National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien to cut short an overseas trip and return to oversee daily crisis meetings at the White House.

Government agencies and hundreds of Fortune 500 companies are still assessing the damage done by the cyberattack, which involved code embedded in updates for a widely used network-management software made by SolarWinds Corp.

Among the targets hit were the U.S. nuclear weapons agency and at least three states, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Other potential victims include the Pentagon, which confirmed it has contracts with SolarWinds, and Microsoft Corp., which found code related to the cyber-attack “in our environment, which we isolated and removed,” spokesman Frank Shaw said in a statement Thursday.

Trump has yet to say anything about the hack. “It is extremely troubling that the president does not appear to be acknowledging, much less acting upon, the gravity of this situation,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement Friday.

Unlike in 2016, the latest attack didn’t involve election interference, but there’s little doubt it was a serious strike. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Thursday called it a “grave risk” to federal, state and local governments, as well as critical infrastructure and the private sector. SolarWinds said 18,000 customers downloaded the tampered software update.

Security experts familiar with the hack said that even if evidence is still being gathered, it’s important to come out with a swift condemnation and set about taking measures to establish some sort of deterrence.

“The one thing you can say is the Trump administration has basically given the Russians a green light by not calling them out,” said James Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That’s what you want to watch for: Does the Trump administration take any action even if it’s just symbolic? And so far the answer is no.”

Although Obama has been criticized for reacting too slowly to the Russian election meddling, the sanctions he eventually imposed sparked one of the most notorious episodes of the Trump era: the decision by Trump’s incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, to privately urge Russia not to respond to Obama’s sanctions. Trump last month pardoned Flynn after he was convicted of lying about the conversations he had with Russia’s ambassador on the matter.

Trump and many of his top aides have repeatedly tried to shift the spotlight to China as America’s biggest national security threat, sometimes downplaying Russian actions in comparison. Ending his presidency by going after Russia would contradict that strategy.

According to one person familiar with the president’s thinking, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations, Trump has never let go of the belief that he could leverage personal ties with President Putin to improve relations with Russia. That would make it much harder for his staff to discuss punishment for fear that Trump would reject it out of hand.

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