Security News > 2020 > December > Hacked Networks Will Need to be Burned 'Down to the Ground'
It's going to take months to kick elite hackers widely believed to be Russian out of the U.S. government networks they have been quietly rifling through since as far back as March in Washington's worst cyberespionage failure on record.
Experts say there simply are not enough skilled threat-hunting teams to duly identify all the government and private-sector systems that may have been hacked.
The only way to be sure a network is clean is "To burn it down to the ground and rebuild it," Schneier said.
During the 2014-15 hack, "We lost access to unclassified networks but were able to move all operations to classified networks with minimal disruptions," he said via email.
Given the fierce tenor of cyberespionage - the U.S., Russia and China all have formidable offensive hacking teams and have been penetrating each others' government networks for years - many American officials are wary of putting anything sensitive on government networks.