UPSC Articles
SolarWinds Hack: A cyberattack discovered in the USA
Part of: GS Prelims and GS-III – Cybersecurity
In news
- The ‘SolarWinds hack’, a cyberattack recently discovered in the USA.
- It has emerged as one of the biggest ever targeted against the US government, its agencies and several other private companies.
- It is likely a global cyberattack.
Key takeaways
- 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 a dominant software from SolarWinds with clients, which include over 33,000 companies.
- 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.
