Video: Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner Opening Remarks at Hearing on the Hack of U.S. Networks by a Foreign Adversary
From Sen. Mark Warner’s office…you can watch the video here.
Below are Chairman Warner’s opening remarks as prepared for delivery:
First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome our two new Members, Senators Casey and Gillibrand, to the Committee. I look forward to working with you, and all of our Members, in the bipartisan tradition of this Committee.
The Intelligence Committee’s record of working together in the interest of America’s national security has been due, in no small part, to the tireless efforts of our former Chairman, Senator Burr, and our new Vice Chairman, Senator Rubio. So I want to take this opportunity during my first hearing as Chairman to thank you both for your partnership. I am confident we will be able to keep working together in a bipartisan way in the 117th Congress.
I would like to welcome our witnesses today:
- Kevin Mandia, CEO of FireEye;
- Sudhakar Ramakrishna, President and CEO of SolarWinds;
- Brad Smith, President of Microsoft; and
- George Kurtz, President and CEO of CrowdStrike.
We also invited a representative from Amazon Web Services to join us today, but unfortunately, they declined.
Today’s hearing is on the widespread compromise of public and private computer networks in the United States by a foreign adversary, colloquially called the “SolarWinds Hack.” But while most infections appear to have been caused by a trojanized update of SolarWinds’ Orion software, further investigation has revealed additional victims who do not use SolarWinds tools. It has become clear that there is much more to learn about this incident, its causes, its scope and scale, and where we go from here.
This is the second hearing we’ve held on this topic. Our first was a closed hearing on January 6th with the government agencies responding to this incident. It is going to take the combined power of both the public and private sector to understand and respond to what happened.
Preliminary indications suggest that the scope and scale of this incident are beyond any that we’ve confronted as a nation, and its implications are significant. Even though what we’ve seen so far indicates this was…
