“There are more nongovernmental victims than there are governmental victims, with a big focus on I.T. companies, especially in the security industry,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said in an interview on Thursday. The national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, cut short a trip to the Middle East and Europe on Tuesday and returned to Washington to run crisis meetings to assess the situation. The Russian ambassador to the United States, Anatoly I. Antonov, said Wednesday that there were “unfounded attempts by the U.S. media to blame Russia” for the recent cyberattacks. They created special bits of code intended to avoid detection by American warning systems and timed their intrusions not to raise suspicions.

Source: New York Times December 19, 2020 08:19 UTC