The US has issued an emergency order after revealing that its treasury and commerce departments had been hacked.
All federal civilian agencies have been told to disconnect from SolarWinds, a computer network tool that is being exploited by “malicious actors”.
The US has not publicly identified who is behind the attack.
The incident comes less than a week after cyber security firm FireEye disclosed that its hacking tools had been stolen in a breach.
In its order, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) said the current hack had a high potential to compromise government systems.
Tech firm SolarWinds, which designed the tool, said on Twitter that users of its Orion platform should upgrade immediately to address a “security vulnerability”.
FireEye revealed in a blog post it had identified “a global campaign” from earlier this year to compromise the computer networks of private and public organisations by inserting malicious code into software updates.
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The firm said this included updates to SolarWinds Orion, which give attackers remote access to the victims’ environment.
It added that the campaign demonstrated “top-tier operations tradecraft and resources” consistent with state-sponsored attackers.
Three people familiar with investigations into the most recent attack told Reuters news agency that Russia is believed to be behind the hack.
In a statement on Facebook, Russia’s foreign ministry described the allegations as “baseless”.
Source: BBC NEWS
