SolarWinds Hack Was the Largest and Most Sophisticated Attack Ever

By Paul Davis

Back in November of 2019, Microsoft’s President Brad Smith was questioned on 60 Minutes about the SolarWinds cyber hack, which the U.S. intelligence community stated was likely committed by “an actor Russian in origin.”

“I think from a software engineering perspective, it’s probably fair to say that this is the largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen,” Smith said.

On February 23rd, Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Vice Chairman, spoke at an open hearing on the SolarWinds Hack.

He thanked their witnesses from Microsoft, Fire Eye, SolarWinds and Crowd Strike, who appeared before the committee to discuss what has been called the largest cyber supply chain operation ever detected.

Rubio noted that the cyber operation involved the modification of the SolarWinds Orion platform, a widely used software product, to include a malicious backdoor that was downloaded by up to 18,000 SolarWinds customers between March and June 2020.

“Perhaps most insidious about the operation was that it hijacked the very security advice promulgated by computer security professionals to verify and apply patches as they are issued,’ Rubio said. “There are many concerning aspects to this operation that raise significant questions.”

Rubio stated that it was his understanding that if FireEye had not investigated an anomalous event within its own network in November of 2020, it was quite possibl...