Trump Warns Cyberattack On U.S. May Be China, Not Russia
'I have been fully briefed, and everything is well under control'
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President Donald Trump weighed in on the huge cyberattack against the US, which was detected last week, suggesting the offender might be Communist China, not Russia.
“The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
“I have been fully briefed, and everything is well under control."
"Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!).”
The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control. Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2020
But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told radio host Mark Levin the Russians “pretty clearly” behind the attack.
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“I can’t say much more as we’re still unpacking precisely what it is, and I’m sure some of it will remain classified,” Pompeo stated.
“This was a very significant effort, and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”
Levin asked Pompeo if Trump was silent on the issue because there is a lot going on behind the scenes; Pompeo responded:
“That’s absolutely true.”
“I saw this in my time running the world’s premier espionage service at the CIA,” Pompeo said.
“There are many things that you’d very much love to say, ‘Boy, I’m going to call that out,’ but a wiser course of action to protect the American people is to calmly go about your business and defend freedom.”
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On Friday, sources told Yahoo News that they believe the hackers conducted a dry run attack when Democrats impeached Trump in 2019.
“We’re thinking they wanted to test whether or not it was going to work and whether it would be detected. So it was more or less a dry run,” a source familiar with the investigation told Yahoo News.
“They took their time. They decided to not go out with an actual backdoor right away."
"That signifies that they’re a little bit more disciplined and deliberate.”
The cyberattack infiltrated various U.S. government departments and agencies, including those monitoring the nation’s nuclear weapons.
The New York Times reported:
Over the past few years, the United States government has spent tens of billions of dollars on cyber offensive abilities, building a giant war room at Fort Meade, Md., for United States Cyber Command, while installing defensive sensors all around the country — a system named Einstein to give it an air of genius — to deter the nation’s enemies from picking its networks clean, again.
It now is clear that the broad Russian espionage attack on the United States government and private companies, underway since spring and detected by the private sector only a few weeks ago, ranks among the greatest intelligence failures of modern times.
Einstein missed it — because the Russian hackers brilliantly designed their attack to avoid setting it off.
The National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security were looking elsewhere, understandably focused on protecting the 2020 election.
