In December, the United States discovered that Russia had been able to hack into US Treasury Department. We are now learning that in a completely separate hack, a US Software company has been infiltrated, and malware has been installed into their software. The Texas-based company SolarWinds sells software that lets an organization see what's happening on its computer networks. Around 18,000 SolarWinds customers installed the tainted update onto their systems, the company said. The compromised update has had a sweeping impact, the scale of which keeps growing as new information emerges. Hackers managed to access a system that SolarWinds uses to put together updates to its Orion product. From there, they inserted malicious code into otherwise legitimate software update. This is known as a supply-chain attack because it infects software as it's under assembly.
SolarWinds has also come under scrutiny for vulnerabilities in its software. These are coding errors and aren't the result of attackers entering SolarWinds systems to implant malware. Instead, hackers must access victim systems and then exploit the flaws in Orion software running there. On Feb. 2, government officials believe a group of suspected hackers had gained access to federal government agencies using a software flaw in SolarWinds software. In addition to gaining access to several government systems, the hackers turned a run-of-the-mill software update into a weapon. That weapon was pointed at thousands of groups, not just the agencies and companies that the hackers focused on after they installed the tainted Orion update.
Credits:
https://www.cnet.com/news/solarwinds-hack-officially-blamed-on-russia-what-you-need-to-know/
No comments:
Post a Comment