The world still might not know about the hack if not for FireEye, a three-and-a-half billion dollar cybersecurity company run by Kevin Mandia, a former Air Force intelligence officer. How did Microsoft miss this?īrad Smith: I think that when you look at the sophistication of this attacker there's an asymmetric advantage for somebody playing offense.īrad Smith: Almost certainly, these attacks are continuing. And the answer we came to was, well, certainly more than 1,000.īill Whitaker: You guys are Microsoft. One compared it to a Rembrandt painting, the closer they looked, the more details emerged.īrad Smith: When we analyzed everything that we saw at Microsoft, we asked ourselves how many engineers have probably worked on these attacks. Microsoft has assigned 500 engineers to dig in to the attack. 4,032 of them were clandestinely re-written and distributed to customers in a routine update, opening up a secret backdoor to the 18,000 infected networks. It's made up of millions of lines of computer code. departments worldwide, it's indispensable.
#SOLARWINDS HACK 2020 SOFTWARE#
"SolarWinds Orion" is one of the most ubiquitous software products you probably never heard of, but to thousands of I.T.
#SOLARWINDS HACK 2020 UPDATE#
When that update went out to 18,000 organizations around the world, so did this malware. They installed malware into an update for a SolarWinds product. What this attacker did was identify network management software from a company called SolarWinds. needs to strike back after SolarWinds hackīrad Smith: I think from a software engineering perspective, it's probably fair to say that this is the largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen.īrad Smith: One of the really disconcerting aspects of this attack was the widespread and indiscriminate nature of it.
departments of Justice, State, Treasury, Energy, and Commerce –among others-and for nine months, they had unfettered access to top-level communications, court documents, even nuclear secrets. After it was installed, Russian agents went rummaging through the digital files of the U.S. As we first reported in February, the hidden virus spread to 18,000 government and private computer networks by way of one of those software updates we all take for granted.
#SOLARWINDS HACK 2020 CODE#
Last year, in perhaps the most audacious cyber attack in history, Russian military hackers sabotaged a tiny piece of computer code buried in a popular piece of software called SolarWinds. When Presidents Biden and Putin met in Geneva last month – it was the first time that the threat of cyber war eclipsed that of nuclear war between the two old super-powers… and "SolarWinds" was one big reason why.
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