Fed Krebs claimed 2020 elections ‘most secure’ in US history amid massive Chinese cyberwarfare
Former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Christopher Krebs doubled down on his claim that the 2020 US elections were secure despite his agency releasing a report showing that there has been a massive months-long cyberterrorism campaign against the United States.
“While elections are sometimes messy, this was a secure election. Of that I have no doubt,” Krebs said in his opening statement to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee examining election irregularities.
But his former agency disagrees.
The CISA statement reads:
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) tonight issued Emergency Directive 21-01, in response to a known compromise involving SolarWinds Orion products that are currently being exploited by malicious actors. This Emergency Directive calls on all federal civilian agencies to review their networks for indicators of compromise and disconnect or power down SolarWinds Orion products immediately.
The much-maligned Dominion Voting System that was used in several contested swing states including Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia used the compromised SolarWinds system despite the company trying to hide that fact:
The vulnerability was explained on tenable.com:
The backdoor resides in a dynamic-link library (DLL) file named SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll. The file was digitally signed by SolarWinds with a valid certificate on March 24, meaning it would be trusted by the underlying operating system and would not raise any alarms.
The backdoored DLL file was seeded as part of SolarWinds software builds between March and June 2020, which are accessible via the SolarWinds website. Once an organization installed the malicious software update, the backdoored DLL file would remain in hibernation for a period of two weeks before beginning its operation. This is one of the stealthy elements of this operation. FireEye says in its blog post that the backdoor also managed to “blend in with legitimate SolarWinds activity” in order to evade detection.
“From a timing perspective, particularly with the setting of the Electoral College and 306 electoral votes for President-elect Biden, you know, I think we’re past the point where we need to be having conversations about the outcome of this election,” Krebs said Wednesday.
Clearly Krebs wants to move on. Could it be because he knew about the vulnerabilities and failed to do anything about it?
As a side note, Krebs also contradicted the legacy media and Dominion CEO talking point that the Dominion machines weren’t connected to the Internet, which would make them vulnerable to hacking.
