Russia Challenges 

Biden Again 

With Broad 

Cybersurveillance 

Operation

The Russian agency behind the SolarWinds hacking has launched another campaign to pierce thousands of U.S. government, corporate and think-tank computer networks, Microsoft officials said.

[The original headline to this article was significantly belied by the text below. The headline has now been changed to:]

Ignoring Sanctions, Russia Renews Broad Cybersurveillance Operation

Earlier this year, the White House blamed the S.V.R. for the so-called SolarWinds hacking, a highly sophisticated effort to alter software used by government agencies and the nation’s largest companies, giving the Russians broad access to 18,000 users. Mr. Biden said the attack undercut trust in the government’s basic systems and vowed retaliation for both the intrusion and election interference. But when he announced sanctions against Russian financial institutions and technology companies in April, he pared back the penalties.

“I was clear with President Putin that we could have gone further, but I chose not to do so,” Mr. Biden said at time, after calling the Russian leader. “Now is the time to de-escalate.”

American officials insist that the type of attack Microsoft reported falls into the category of the kind of spying major powers regularly conduct against one another. Still, the operation suggests that even while the two governments say they are meeting regularly to combat ransomware and other maladies of the internet age, the undermining of networks continues apace in an arms race that has sped up as countries sought Covid-19 vaccine data and a range of industrial and government secrets.

“Spies are going to spy,” John Hultquist, the vice president for intelligence analysis at Mandiant, the company that first detected the SolarWinds attack…

American officials confirmed that the operation, which they consider routine spying, was underway. But they insisted that if it was successful, it was Microsoft and similar providers of cloud services who bore much of the blame.

A senior administration official called the latest attacks “unsophisticated, run-of-the mill operations that could have been prevented if the cloud service providers had implemented baseline cybersecurity practices.”

“We can do a lot of things,” the official said, “but the responsibility to implement simple cybersecurity practices to lock their — and by extension, our — digital doors rests with the private sector.”