Hack of the Century
On December 13th the United States government unveiled it was one of many of the victims of several cyber-attacks that happened during the week. Well over 18,000 companies including federal agencies like the White House, The Pentagon, and the US Treasury Department were hit during this massive attack. One alarming thought of the aftermath of the hack is the unknown amount of info the attackers gained, being that the United States Department of Defense was also one of the 18,000 attacked over the week leaving us with a haunting question, did the attackers get the launch codes of our nuclear weapons? And if the answer is yes, then how will we change the codes and protect our country against our own weapons?
SolarWinds is the company that unknowingly posted the infected update to their website in March, has taken down the infected file once it was revealed. The hacker’s set up a trojan malware (a computer virus that hides as legitimate software, file, etc.) that might have been hiding in the update file since March. The infected update file contained a sunburst backdoor (a sunburst is a back door for authorized and unauthorized people to enter and exit the targeted software). The sunburst wasn’t spotted by the security software because of the sophisticated way it behaved once it was on the computers. The virus was under the name “SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll” in thousands of computers as an official name but in secrecy was a sophisticated backdoor for the hackers.
There are several ways that SolarWinds could have avoided this attack, first reviewing and scanning all update files could of went a long way In protecting the security infrastructure of the company. The group responsible for this major attack is unknown but fingers are pointed at Russia at the moment, being that this is a nationwide attack targeting several companies and not a singular intrusion. A spokesperson for the Department of Commerce confirmed the hack, “We can confirm there has been a breach in one of our bureaus. We have asked CISA and the FBI to investigate, and we comment further at this time,”
