Security News > 2020 > December > Cybersecurity Firm FireEye Says Was Hacked by Nation State
Prominent U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye said Tuesday that foreign government hackers with "World-class capabilities" broke into its network and stole offensive tools it uses to probe the defenses of its thousands of customers, who include federal, state and local governments and top global corporations.
Neither Mandia nor a FireEye spokeswoman said when the company detected the hack or who might be responsible.
FireEye has been at the forefront of investigating state-backed hacking groups, including Russian groups trying to break into state and local governments in the U.S. that administer elections.
U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat on the Senate's intelligence committee, applauded FireEye for quickly disclosing the intrusion, saying the case "Shows the difficulty of stopping determined nation-state hackers."
"This could have been much worse if their customer data had been hacked and exfiltrated. So far there is no evidence of that," Alperovitch said, citing hacks of other cybersecurity companies - RSA Security in 2011 and Bit9 two years later - that contributed to the compromise of customer data.