Secretary of state Mike Pompeo said on Friday it was clear that Russia was behind the widespread hacking of government systems that officials this week called “a grave risk” to the US.

Pompeo is the first member of the Trump administration to publicly link the Kremlin to the cyberattack, which used a variety of sophisticated tools to infiltrate dozens of government and private systems, including nuclear laboratories and the Pentagon, treasury and commerce departments.

“I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,” Pompeo said in an interview on the Mark Levin Show.

“This was a very significant effort,” he said, adding that “we’re still unpacking precisely what it is”.

President Trump has yet to address the attack.

But intelligence agencies have told Congress that they believe it was carried out by the SVR, an elite Russian intelligence agency. As evidence of the attack’s scope piled up this week, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent out an urgent warning on Thursday that the hackers had “demonstrated an ability to exploit software supply chains and shown significant knowledge of Windows networks.”

New York Times News Service