National Security Agency Director Gen. Paul Nakasone addressed the elephant in the room on Thursday during testimony on Capitol Hill: How could the U.S. government have missed SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange Server hacking until after the malicious activity was already well underway?
“It’s not the fact that we can’t connect the dots — we can’t see all the dots,” Nakasone said, acknowledging that the U.S. government, including the NSA, does not have a view into foreign hacking campaigns when they exploit domestic internet infrastructure. “We have a difficulty as a government understanding the totality of the actual intrusion.”