[Regnum] Hackers have breached US government devices protected by Cisco firewalls. Bloomberg reported this on September 26, citing Chris Butera, an official with the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA).
"Hackers have breached security systems across the U.S. federal government. <…> On Thursday afternoon, CISA issued an emergency directive requiring federal agencies to patch vulnerabilities and identify and remediate potential breaches in hundreds of firewall devices used by the U.S. government's Cisco Systems Inc.", the publication states.
According to Butera, the scale and severity of the cyberattack's impact have not yet been determined, nor is it known which agencies were affected. However, he did not rule out the possibility that critical US infrastructure could have been affected.
In July, Bloomberg also reported that a large-scale cyberattack on Microsoft compromised computers at the US National Nuclear Security Administration. However, a source at the agency noted that no confidential or classified information was affected. Hackers also damaged the US Department of Education and several other state-level agencies, as well as systems belonging to governments in Europe and the Middle East. Microsoft then accused the allegedly Chinese-linked groups Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon of involvement in the attacks.