SolarWinds: 18,000 Customers installed backdoored software, 40+ victims identified | | SolarWinds, the enterprise monitoring software provider which found itself at the epicenter of the most consequential supply chain attacks, said as many as 18,000 of its high-profile customers might have installed a tainted version of its Orion products. The Texas-based company serves more than 300,000 customers worldwide, including every branch of the US military and four-fifths of the Fortune 500 companies. | The company also reiterated in its security advisory that besides 2019.4 HF 5 and 2020.2 versions of SolarWinds Orion Platform, no other versions of the monitoring software or other non-Orion products were impacted by the vulnerability. | Troublingly, according to a report from security researcher Vinoth Kumar, it also appears that a publicly-accessible SolarWinds GitHub repository was leaking FTP credentials of the domain "downloads.solarwinds.com," thus allowing an attacker to potentially upload a malicious executable disguised as Orion software updates to the downloads portal. Even worse, the FTP server was protected by a trivial password. | The development comes a day after cybersecurity firm FireEye said it identified a nine-month-long global intrusion campaign targeting public and private entities that introduce malicious code into legitimate software updates for SolarWinds' Orion software to break into the companies' networks and install a backdoor called SUNBURST. The US Department of Homeland Security was breached, as were the departments of Commerce and Treasury, Reuters reported yesterday. The espionage campaign also included the December 8 cyberattack on FireEye, although it's not immediately clear whether the intrusion and exfiltration was a direct result of a rogue SolarWinds update. | Microsoft said that over 40 of its customers had their networks infiltrated by hackers following the SolarWinds supply chain attack after they installed backdoored versions of the Orion IT monitoring platform. 80% of the identified victims are located in the United States and the rest of 20% is spread over seven other countries including Canada, Mexico, Belgium, Spain, the United Kingdom, Israel, and the UAE. What's certain is that, following the ongoing investigation of these attacks, "the number and location of victims will keep growing." | | |
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