- The Washington Times - Tuesday, February 9, 2021

The leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence are furious with the intelligence community and pleading with it to assign a leader to handle the SolarWinds hack affecting a government-estimated 18,000 public and private sector customers.

After news broke late last year that hackers breached SolarWinds computer network management software to access federal government and corporate networks, former President Trump’s National Security Council responded by creating a Cyber Unified Coordination Group including the FBI, National Security Agency, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

On Tuesday, Sens. Mark Warner, Virginia Democrat, and Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, wrote to the leadership of those agencies to tell them that their response “lacked the leadership and coordination” necessary to respond to the hack.

The intelligence committee chair and its top-ranking Republican wrote that they had “little confidence that we are on the shortest path to recovery.”

“The briefings we have received convey a disjointed and disorganized response to confronting the breach,” Mr. Warner and Mr. Rubio wrote. “Taking a federated rather than a unified approach means that critical tasks that are outside the central roles of your respective agencies are likely to fall through the cracks. The threat our country still faces from this incident needs clear leadership to develop and guide a unified strategy for recovery, in particular a leader who has the authority to coordinate the response, set priorities and direct resources to where they are needed.”

Mr. Warner and Mr. Rubio added that the federal government’s handling of the SolarWinds hack is “too critical for us to continue operating the way we have been” and urged the federal government to change course immediately.

• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.

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