I read most of it.
Summary: if a computer or data is accessible on the internet, assume it can be hacked no matter how much 'protection' you have. Individual home users and most small businesses are no match for even mediocre hackers. There are so many vulnerabilities in all software that hackers can exploit to gain access. Add in the folks that open bad email attachments or links and the job is even easier.
In short, if you want to completely protect your data from hackers, unplug from the internet.
Oh, and I bet there are similar articles in China accusing the U.S. of doing the same types of attacks (and they are likely true).
I watched this first hand Friday.
I have a computer at work that we lease from the franchise and pay fees each month to support.
It has not worked properly since it was sent brand new in May of 2018. I inherited the responsibility to get it working again. I have called their support line many times and have gotten the run around.
Friday I was told it was our ethernet connection cord, the computer had no internet connection (they said they could see that somehow.) They would help me once I had our people run a new one, but they were closing the ticket because that would fix it... end of story.
Once I hung up, I unplugged that sucker, moved it to where our other working franchise computers are. I unplugged one of them, and attached my non functioning franchise computer and called them back.
The computer would not even let us get past the windows welcome screen to put in login and password.
Generally we have to have the computer open and we remote in the tech guys.
This second call I made on Friday, I got a different guy who was awesome. He saw my problem was not that the internet was not connected/working. He identified that the computer was now on a new line, which I confirmed. About that time, my cursor starts to move around.
Without remoting him in, he was in my computer! Holy Batman.
He opened up a whole bunch of programing areas, re-configured a bunch a stuff, ran some test and pronounced that it had hardware issues. This Computer was new in May, and has never worked properly. Has been re-imaged 2 times but still wont work... now I have to get IBM to come out.
That was awesome/scary to see someone take control of a computer that I could not even get to start with authorized passwords.