China’s Microsoft Hack, Russia’s SolarWinds Attack Threaten to Overwhelm U.S.

China’s global attack on Microsoft’s popular email software revealed last week and an equally sprawling Russian attack discovered three months ago have created a two-front war that threatens to overwhelm cybersecurity’s emergency responders, according to former U.S. officials and private security firms.

The coincidence of two far-reaching hacking campaigns launched by Russia and China, discovered just weeks apart, is now rippling across the global economy -- swamping insurers, IT staff, and firms that specialize in hunting and ejecting hackers.

The twin hacking campaigns involve the U.S.’s two most powerful cyberspace adversaries, and both have led to emergency meetings of the White House National Security Council, in part because of the unusually wide net cast by the attackers.

But for the tens of thousands of companies that have been impacted by one or another of the attacks, the one-two punch has left them scrambling to secure their computer systems -- in some cases from hackers who are piling on the original nation-state attacks.

“It’s a race,” said Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security & trust. “Since the time we went public with the update’s availability, we’ve seen the number of compromised customers just explode. It went up incredibly rapidly and continues to increase.”