The latest confirmed victim in the now infamous SolarWinds Worldwide LLC hack is reported to be the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as email accounts belonging to the then-DHS head and cybersecurity staff were breached.

The Associated Press reported today that it was “suspected Russian hackers” that gained access to DHS officials. The access is said to have included the email account of Chad Wolf, then acting secretary of the DHS. The AP report also claimed that the Biden administration is trying to keep a tight lid on the extent of the SolarWinds hack as it weighs retaliatory measures against Russia.

Exactly how many companies and government departments have been affected by the SolarWinds hack may never be known. The estimate last month was 18,000, but it may be even larger. As Microsoft Corp. President Brad Smith said in February, the SolarWinds hack was the “largest, most sophisticated attack ever.”

Other known victims of the SolarWinds hack include the U.S. Commerce and Treasury Departments, National Finance Center, the State Department, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Energy Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration along with Cisco and FireEye.

“If there is the possibility of a silver lining in this news, it’s that we should expect that (if followed) protocols related to information classification should have precluded more sensitive details from being directly accessible and exposed without a hostile, foreign actor first finding access and exfiltration channels on classified networks,” Tim Wade, technical director and chief technology officer team at artificial intelligence cybersecurity company Vectra AI Inc., told SiliconANGLE. “Nonetheless, even unclassified communication between sensitive parties can disclose a great deal of actionable intelligence – the concerns raised by this story should not be understated.”

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