How Should the U.S. Respond to Russia’s Cyberattack?

The problem with trying to understand the massive data breach the United States is dealing with at the moment is that the list of agencies and industries that have been affected just keeps growing. There are Fortune 500 companies, places like Microsoft and Cisco. Then there are state and federal governments: the city of Austin, Texas, the U.S. nuclear weapons agency, the Department of Homeland Security.

And Slate’s Fred Kaplan says that right now, all of these places have a bunch of workers scouring their back-end systems, looking for clues. They are looking for signs of a perniciously quiet kind of infiltration. Infiltration made possible by malware that rode in as part of a software update pushed through months ago, to nearly 18,000 clients of a firm called SolarWinds. “We’ve never really seen anything like this,” said Kaplan, the author of Dark Territories, a book about the history of cyberwarfare.