White House Closes Response Teams SolarWinds, Microsoft Exchange Hackings, Official Says

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The White House is standing down the two emergency teams it set up to direct the US government's response to the SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange hacking incidents, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology Anne Neuberger said in a statement on Monday.

"Due to the vastly increased patching and reduction in victims, we are standing down the current UCG [Unified Coordination Group] surge efforts and will be handling further responses through standard incident management procedures," Neuberger explained in the White House press release.

The Biden Administration convened two UCGs to drive a whole of government response to the SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange incidents, the statement noted.

"The innovations from the Exchange UCG and the lessons learned from these responses will be used to improve future unified, whole of Government responses to significant cyber incidents, including integrating private sector partners at the executive and tactical levels," Neuberger said.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) created a methodology to track trends in patching and exposing Exchange servers to let the UCG quantify the scope of the incident. The National Security Agency and CISA also released advisories giving adversary techniques and provided mitigation for system owners, the statement said.