US cybersecurity fails—Russian hackers got past NSA and Cybercom’s best efforts

David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth and Julian E. Barnes, "Billions Spent on U.S. Defenses Failed to Detect Giant Russian Hack (Published 2020)," No Publication, 12-16-2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/us/politics/russia-hack-putin-trump-biden.html-- 嘉玮

WASHINGTON — Over the past few years, the United States government has spent tens of billions of dollars on cyberoffensive abilities, building a giant war room at Fort Meade, Md., for United States Cyber Command, while installing defensive sensors all around the country — a system named Einstein to give it an air of genius — to deter the nation’s enemies from picking its networks clean, again.

It now is clear that the broad Russian espionage attack on the United States government and private companies, underway since spring and detected by the private sector only a few weeks ago, ranks among the greatest intelligence failures of modern times.

Einstein missed it — because the Russian hackers brilliantly designed their attack to avoid setting it off. The National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security were looking elsewhere, understandably focused on protecting the 2020 election.

The new American strategy of “defend forward” — essentially, putting American “beacons” into the networks of its adversaries that would warn of oncoming attacks and provide a platform for counterstrikes — provided little to no deterrence for the Russians, who have upped their game significantly since the 1990s, when they launched an attack on the Defense Department called Moonlight Maze.