>>The sophisticated cyber campaign that breached email accounts across the federal government created a deepening crisis Monday as signs multiplied about the scope of the foreign intruders’ reach.
>>"This is probably going to be one of the most consequential cyberattacks in U.S. history,” one U.S. official said, after the National Security Council held its second meeting in three days about the attacks, which security experts have linked to Russian intelligence. “That's the view from inside government — that we're dealing with something of a scale that I don't think we've had to deal with before."
>>Investigators believe that the hackers added malicious code to software updates for an IT product used across the federal government, used that code to pry open doors into agency networks and then used a sophisticated technique to access federal workers’ emails.
>>By infecting the software updates that SolarWinds distributed to users of its Orion IT monitoring system, the hackers gained a foothold in those users’ networks. From there, they appear to have broken into victims’ Microsoft email servers by forging the authentication tokens that tell the system who should be granted access.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/14/massively-disruptive-cyber-crisis-engulfs-multiple-agencies-445376