The attackers used a third-party IT management software called Orion, supplied by SolarWinds, to float through the internal systems of US government agencies.
By SMRITI SHARMA
The SolarWinds cyber attack was one of the biggest attacks to have targeted private companies and US government agencies. The cyberattack was first discovered by FireEye which is a US cybersecurity company and since that day more discoveries and developments have come to light with each passing day.
The scale of the attack is still unknown but it was notified that the Department of Commerce, Parts of the Pentagon, US Treasury, and Department of Homeland Security were all compromised and impacted.
The cybersecurity company FireEye in a blog post mentioned an attack on its system for the first time. The CEO of FireEye wrote in a blog post that it was a top-tier attack indicating that it was a state-sponsored attack. He however did not mention Russia explicitly but the fact that most of the customers affected were government customers is vocal on its own.
The attackers used a third-party IT management software called Orion, supplied by SolarWinds, to float through the internal systems of US government agencies.
Steven Adair, a cybersecurity expert, and his team are a group of experts who were cleaning and in the final stage of getting rid of the hackers a network when they figured out a similarity with SolarWinds hacking.
The think tank’s network that he was working on was also attacked by hackers and he states that the spies not only managed to break in but also sail straight through to the email system of the clients, shredding the password protection like it doesn’t exist in the very first place.
Only recently did the team realize that the hackers that they have been dealing with are the same set of advanced dexterous hackers who were behind the SolarWinds hacking.
At the point when information on the hack broke, Adair quickly recalled the research organization, where his group had followed one of the break-in endeavors to a SolarWinds worker however never found the proof they expected to nail the exact passage point or alarm the organization. Advanced pointers distributed by FireEye on Dec. 13 affirmed that the research organization and SolarWinds had been hit by a similar entertainer.
Adair said the work to evacuate the programmers from the research organization – which he declined to distinguish – extended from late 2019 to mid-2020 and occasioned two reestablished break-ins. Performing out a similar assignment across the U.S. government is probably going to be commonly more troublesome.
He stated that it could easily take about half a year to figure the fundamentals of the hack. He suggests the experts involved in the rectification of the problem to leave no stone unturned.
Originally published at Tech story