U.S. officials characterize SolarWinds hack as ‘intelligence gathering’ operation, ‘likely Russian in origin’

The U.S. homeland security and intelligence community in a statement today said the massive SolarWinds hack of federal and private-sector networks appears to be part of an intelligence gathering operation by a Russian “advanced persistent threat actor.”

The U.S. government’s Cyber Unified Coordination Group, known as the UCG, “believes that, of the approximately 18,000 affected public and private sector customers of Solar Winds’ Orion product, a much smaller number have been compromised by follow-on activity on their systems. We have...