In what may well turn out to be one of the most significant supply-chain attacks in recent years, a likely nation-state backed group compromised systems at SolarWinds and inserted malware into updates of the company’s widely used Orion network management products that were released between March and June 2020.
In total, about 33,000 of SolarWinds’ 300,000 customers — which include numerous government agencies, 499 of the Fortune 500 companies, and over 22,000 managed service providers — could have potentially received the compromised software updates. Some 18,000 organizations worldwide may have actually installed the poisoned software on their systems, SolarWinds said in a SEC filing Monday.
The filing suggested that attackers might have initially broken into SolarWinds’ systems by…