TAKING STOCK- At least 200 organizations, including gov’t agencies and companies around the world, have been hacked as part of a suspected Russian cyber-attack of widely used software program SolarWinds. The final number is expected to rise seeing as up to 18k SolarWinds’ customers received the malicious update through an undetected backdoor.

The US commerce and energy departments and Microsoft are among those compromised alongside other US, UK, Israeli and Canadian gov’t agencies and firms — with the hackers gaining access to everything from corporate secrets to covid research. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an alert that the hackers “posed a grave risk to federal, state and local governments, as well as critical infrastructure and the private sector.” The true scale of the attack is still unquantified and Russia has denied allegations of involvement. Bloomberg and the Financial Times have the story.

Welcome to the age of Cyberwar? Incoming White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said the Biden camp is considering penalties that go beyond sanctions, Reuters reports. “It’s not just sanctions. It’s steps and things we could do to degrade the capacity of foreign actors to engage in this sort of attack,” Klain said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

Western countries have yet to provide evidence that Russia is behind the attack, but the consensus in those quarters appears to be that Cozy Bear — an activity sponsored by Russian intelligence — led it.