ST. LOUIS (KMOX) -- You've heard about the suspected Russian hack of several U.S. federal agencies, like Treasury, State, and Justice.
But the vulnerability, it now appears, reaches much further than Washington, D.C.
"This is such a huge hack," says Nick Powers, partner at St. Louis-based technology consultancy firm UNCOMN (pronounced 'uncommon'). We interviewed him as an expert Tuesday on Total Information AM.
Powers says the hacking group "Cozy Bear" appeared to open a backdoor into server management software by a firm called SolarWinds. The malicious code was nicknamed "Sunburst."
Major customers of SolarWinds include the U.S. government, several Fortune 500 corporations, and up to 18,000 companies in all.
These organizations, Powers says, "have installed this software on a majority of their I.T. infrastructure and allowed these hackers to have access to pretty much anything they want to get into."
This potentially means the perpetrators now have "access to personally identifiable information, health care records, passports, credit card data, because this software is on all those different end points."
Powers tells TIAM there could be more to come; the hackers also stole the keys to a major global hacking deterrent.
"This could result in damages in the billions, potentially, when it's all said and done," he says. "We won't know for several months yet how bad this really is."
Overall, Powers says there's a "major uptick" in hacking activity during the pandemic.
More people are exchanging information virtually and criminals are successfully "social engineering" -- or tricking -- people into giving up access.