The problem with trying to understand the massive data breach the United States is dealing with at the moment is that the list of industries and agencies that have been impacted just keeps growing.

There are Fortune 500 companies, places like Microsoft and Cisco. And then there's state and

federal government, the city of Austin, the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Agency, the Department of Homeland Security.

And Slate's Fred Kaplan? He says right now, all these places have got a bunch of workers

scouring their back-end systems, looking for clues.

What they're doing, they're going through logs, who has come into this system?

And they check the, you know, the digital ID of the IP address, of whoever has come in.

So they're checking the guest list.

Yeah, kind of.

And they now know about 15 or 20 of these that are associated with the hack.

So they look for those IDs.

They are looking for signs of a perniciously quiet kind of infiltration.

Infiltration made possible by malware that rode in as part of a software update that got pushed through months ago to nearly 18,000 clients of a firm called Solar Winds.

The malware would be downloaded, but then they wouldn't take advantage of it for days,

weeks, sometimes months.

So you have to dig deep into the logs to even find this thing.

We've never really seen anything like this.

Everything about this hack is shrouded in unknowables. Who was the target? The target seems to be everyone. What information have the hackers taken? We might never know. The only thing

cybersecurity experts do seem sure of is who was behind the plot.

You seem very confident that this was Russia.

This is the kind of thing that can really only be done by a state actor.

I mean, it's been traced to Russia for a lot of reasons, but one kind of inferential reason

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