Statements by Press Secretary Jen Psaki & Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber Anne Neuberger on Microsoft Exchange Vulnerabilities UC

Last week the National Security Council (NSC) established a Unified Coordination Group (UCG), a task force composed of representatives from the FBI, CISA, and ODNI, with support from the NSA, to drive a whole-of-government response to the Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities. On Monday, the NSC convened a UCG leadership meeting, which included private sector members for the first time, coordinating our respective response efforts. We invited the private sector partners based on their specific insights to this incident, an approach the NSC will take going forward as appropriate. The UCG discussed the remaining number of unpatched systems, malicious exploitation, and ways to partner together on incident response, including the methodology partners could use for tracking the incident, going forward.

The cost of cyber incident response weighs particularly heavily on small businesses. Hence, we requested that Microsoft help small businesses with a simple solution to this incident. In response, Microsoft has released a one-click mitigation tool. We encourage every business or organization that has not yet fully patched and scanned their Exchange Server to download and run this free tool.

This Administration is committed to working with the private sector to build back better – including to modernize our cyber defenses and enhance the nation’s ability to respond rapidly to significant cybersecurity incidents.