A security expert on Wednesday warned that when two dozen Republican lawmakers stormed the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) in the Capitol earlier this week because they were unhappy with the Democrat-led impeachment inquiry, they effectively put national security at risk.
Mieke Eoyang, who used to work at the SCIF, explained that it “is a secure facility designed to prevent electronic eavesdropping so members of Congress can receive highly classified information about how the nation collects information on its adversaries, and on very sensitive intelligence operations.” Obviously, foreign adversaries are very interested in what goes on in the SCIF. In order to obtain this information, state-backed hackers can target US lawmakers. According to Eoyang, “members of Congress (and their electronic devices) are high-value targets for compromise by foreign intelligence services,” because they “have access to a wide range of sensitive information” and they “tend to be lax in their security protocols.” Eoyang therefore argued that if threat actors have compromised a personal device belonging to one of the GOP lawmakers who stormed the SCIF, which is not an unrealistic scenario, they were just given a unique opportunity to compromise the facility because the lawmakers failed to follow security procedures during the stunt.
Read more: House Republicans’ national security-threatening impeachment stunt, explained by an expert