US CYBER ATTACKS

Subject: Science & tech

Context : The ‘SolarWinds hack’, a cyberattack recently discovered in the United States, has emerged as one of the biggest ever targeted against the US government, its agencies and several other private companies. In fact, it is likely a global cyberattack.

Concept:

• This is being called a ‘Supply Chain’ attack. Instead of directly attacking the federal government or a private organisation’s network, the hackers target a third-party vendor, which supplies software to them.
• In this case, the target was an IT management software called Orion, supplied by the Texas-based company SolarWinds.
• Orion has been dominant software from SolarWinds with clients, which include over 33,000 companies. SolarWinds says 18,000 of its clients have been impacted.
• The hackers gained “access to victims via trojanized updates to SolarWinds’ Orion IT monitoring and management software. Once installed, the malware gave a backdoor entry to the hackers to the systems and networks of SolarWinds’ customers.