According to a Wall Street Journal analysis, the hackers may have had access to Kent State’s systems for more than a year.
“We are aware of the situation and are evaluating this serious matter,” Kent State spokesman Eric Mansfield said in a statement to cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
Mansfield declined to elaborate on the situation, including what kind of information may have been breached.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Kent State computers were infected with a tainted network monitoring software called SolarWinds Orion that allowed hackers to access the network through a so-called “backdoor” in the code.
Other organizations that were potentially hacked include the California Department of State Hospitals, technology companies Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp., accounting firm Deloitte LLP, cloud-computing software maker VMware Inc. and Belkin International Inc., which sells Belkin and LinkSys Wi-Fi routers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The victims are likely a “small window” into the scope of the hack, which could have affected as many as 18,000 of SolarWinds’ customers, the Austin-based company told the Wall Street Journal.
SolarWinds employees found the malicious code after a routine software update and traced activity from the hackers back to at least October 2019. The company said it is working with security companies, law enforcement and intelligence agencies to investigate the attack, which some suspect is connected to APT29, also known as “Cozy Bear,” a hacker group associated with Russia’s foreign intelligence service.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the suspected Russian hackers also breached U.S. government agencies, including the Treasury and Commerce departments.
Federal cybersecurity experts have suggested that the hackers are sophisticated, with one source telling the Wall Street Journal that the government breach was a “10” on a scale of one to 10 in terms of its likely severity and national security implications.
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