#RSAC: SolarWinds CEO Provides New Details into Attack and Response

New details into the notorious SolarWinds nation-state attack and its fallout were provided by Sudhakar Ramakrishna, CEO of SolarWinds, during a keynote session on Day 3 of the virtual RSA Conference 2021, which was hosted by Laura Koetzle, VP and group director at Forrester.

This included the revelation that the attackers may have accessed the system as early as January 2019, and an expression of remorse for comments made during his congressional appearance about the attack in February 2021.

Starting the session, Ramakrishna explained that he was first informed of the attacks while sitting down to his birthday dinner on December 12, 2020, after receiving a phone call from the company’s legal officer. Ramakrishna was at the time still waiting to take up the position of CEO at SolarWinds on January 4, 2021.

Koetzle asked Ramakrishna whether he ever considered backing out of taking the role as more details about the scale of the incident emerged in the following days. While a number of friends had advised him to do so, Ramakrishna said that “he decided to persevere with this opportunity” after speaking to the SolarWinds chairman, Bill Bock. He was given continuity and support from the previous CEO, Kevin Thompson, as he began the role in January, which helped him enact a fast response to the event.

With SolarWinds believing as many as 18,000 of its customers had been affected by the breach, as that was the number that had downloaded the malicious update, Ramakrishna explained that in the immediate aftermath, the SolarWinds security team looked to contact everyone possible to try to address their concerns and questions.

He was als ..

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