The Guardian

03/01/2025

“Russia and China are our biggest adversaries. With all the cuts being made to different agencies, a lot of cybersecurity personnel have been fired. Our systems are not going to be protected and our adversaries know this,” the person said.

The person added: “People are saying Russia is winning. Putin is on the inside now.”

The New York Times has separately reported that the Trump administration has also reassigned officials at Cisa who were focused on safeguarding elections from cyber-attacks and other attempts to disrupt voting.

Another person who previously worked on US joint task forces operating at elevated classification levels to track and combat Russian cyber threats said the development was “truly shocking”.

“There are thousands of US government employees and military working daily on the massive threat Russia poses as possibly the most significant nation state threat actor. Not to diminish the significance of China, Iran or North Korea, but Russia is at least on par with China as the most significant cyber threat,” the person said.

The person added:“There are dozens of discrete Russia state-sponsored hacker teams dedicated to either producing damage to US government, infrastructure and commercial interests or conducting information theft with a key goal of maintaining persistent access to computer systems.”