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FBI leaves US targets of Russian hackers in the dark
If true, it demonstrates the enormity of Kremlin hacking. It also informs on how unprepared the FBI was (and the US government in-toto) for such attacks and a lack of a coherent policy regarding notification.
By Raphael Satter, Jeff Donn and Desmond Butler | AP
November 27, 2017
Traffic along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington streaks past the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters building
WASHINGTON — The hackers’ targets: The former head of cybersecurity for the U.S. Air Force. An ex-director at the National Security Council. A former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. All were caught up in a Russian government-aligned cyberespionage campaign. None was warned by the FBI. The bureau repeatedly failed to alert targets of the Russian hacking group known as Fancy Bear despite knowing for more than a year that their personal emails were in the Kremlin’s sights, an Associated Press investigation has found. Three people familiar with the matter — including a current and a former government official — said the FBI has known the details of Fancy Bear’s attempts to break into Gmail inboxes for more than a year. A senior FBI official, who was not authorized to publicly discuss the hacking operation because of its sensitivity, said the bureau had been overwhelmed by an “almost insurmountable problem.”
Some targets of Fancy Bear’s spying said they don’t blame the FBI for not notifying them. “The expectation that the government is going to protect everyone and go back to everyone is false,” said Nicholas Eftimiades, a retired senior technical officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency who teaches homeland security at Pennsylvania State University in Harrisburg and was himself among the targets. But Charles Sowell, who previously worked as a senior administrator in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and was targeted by Fancy Bear two years ago, said there was no reason the FBI couldn’t do the same work the AP did. “It’s absolutely not OK for them to use an excuse that there’s too much data,” said Sowell. “Would that hold water if there were a serial killer investigation, and people were calling in tips left and right, and they were holding up their hands and saying, ‘It’s too much’? “That’s ridiculous.”
If true, it demonstrates the enormity of Kremlin hacking. It also informs on how unprepared the FBI was (and the US government in-toto) for such attacks and a lack of a coherent policy regarding notification.
