FBI Director Wray hints at federal response to SolarWinds hack

FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday hinted at the planned federal response to what has become known as the SolarWinds hack, stressing that confronting foreign attacks in cyberspace would be “a long, hard slog.”

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Wray was questioned about how to respond to the breach, which involved likely Russian hackers targeting software from IT group SolarWinds and other vectors to infiltrate at least nine federal agencies and 100 private sector groups.

“Discussing the response in any detail is probably something that would be better done in a classified setting,” Wray said in response to a question from committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). “That by itself might give you a little bit of a hint, but what we have found, speaking more generally, over the last couple of years in the cyber arena in particular is that we are at our most effective when we have joint sequenced operations.”