Pray for our national security agencies to be effective in protecting us as well as combatting cyberespionage against America.

 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. (Phil 4:6)

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“Russian cyberespionage may have achieved its greatest success in 2015.

According to an Oct. 5 report in The Wall Street Journal, in 2015 an employee of a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor — perhaps intending to work at home — stole top-secret information about how the U.S. penetrates foreign computer security networks and defends against cyber-attacks, and copied it onto his home computer. That computer was, he thought, protected by an antivirus software package sold by the Russian company Kaspersky Lab.

That software apparently allowed Russian cyberspies to spot and copy the top-secret software the NSA was using. Russia now knows how the NSA was penetrating foreign computers and can design defenses accordingly. Israeli cyberspies reportedly detected the Russian penetration of the home computer and alerted their U.S. counterparts. It was reportedly the most serious and damaging disclosure of top-secret information since 2013, when Edward Snowden stole and then disseminated top-secret NSA intelligence-gathering programs.

Kaspersky Labs’ antivirus software, like its legitimate counterparts in the cyberworld, function by gaining access to every bit of data and programming on a computer. If, as suspected, it contains “back doors” and other spyware, it may also have the ability to “jump” to any other computers with which the Kaspersky-laden machine comes into contact. According to The New York Times, Kaspersky’s customers have included nearly two-dozen U.S. government agencies and many of their counterparts in Western Europe.

On Sept. 13, the Department of Homeland Security gave all federal agencies 90 days to remove the suspect Kaspersky software. (Kaspersky Labs has denied any connection to the FSB and that its software is Russian spyware.)

We can be certain of at least one thing: that whatever the Kaspersky Labs’ software contains, it is not unique. The danger it represents is only part of the Russian cyberwar against us.

The U.S. intelligence community relies on many civilian contractors — big companies that include Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, CSRA, SAIC and CACI International, and a few smaller companies — for much of its intelligence-gathering and analysis. They multiply the abilities of NSA, CIA and the FBI to detect cyberintrusions, analyze intelligence information and other intelligence-related operations. Thousands of dedicated, trustworthy people perform these functions for their employers 24/7.

But the old adage holds true: Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead. The more people who have access to a secret, the more computers they use to work on that information, the more vulnerable our secrets are. . . .

The big questions remain. Why would the intelligence agencies or their contractors trust any software (or hardware) produced in Russia, China or any adversary nation? Why would anyone in the intelligence or defense communities — agencies, contractors or employees of either — trust such software? Their training, obviously inadequate at this point, should have prevented that.” (Excerpted from The Washington Times, commentary by Jed Babbin, a deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration, is the author of “In the Words of Our Enemies.”)