Russian cyberattack began months ago — and it's a worst-case scenario: MSNBC guest

On MSNBC Tuesday, POLITICO's Eric Geller explained how the Russian cyberattack on the U.S. — one of the worst in history — burrowed so deep into the government.

"Eric, for people that don't understand how the Russian cyber warfare takes place, when could this have been launched?" asked anchor Nicolle Wallace.

"So, one of the reasons that people are really concerned about this inside of the government is because this got underway between March and June of this year, according to experts' best understanding," said Geller. "So it essentially laid dormant in some of the federal agencies for months, for a very long time. Because what they did was, they compromised the software update process for a program that is widely use across the government. And I should also note, across the private industry throughout the Fortune 500. The software updates are applied manually and without much scrutiny, and the hackers compromises the code, and the software updates went through, and the hackers have access to the networks and could jump around getting into email systems."

"That is what experts are concerned about right now," he said. "This is not your standard spear-phishing attack like with John Podesta during 2016; this is the upper end of what hackers could do."

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