SolarWinds Experimenting With New Software Build System in Wake of Breach

SolarWinds Experimenting With New Software Build System in Wake of Breach
CISO of SolarWinds now has complete autonomy to stop product releases if security concerns exist, CEO says.

SolarWinds is experimenting with a completely new software build process that CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna says is designed to ensure much better security against intrusions of the sort that the company disclosed last December.


In addition, SolarWinds' CISO has been given full autonomy to stop product releases from happening purely due to time-to-market reasons. A new committee for cybersecurity has also been established at the board level, which includes the CEO and two CIOs, Ramakrishna said in comments during a virtual panel discussion this week involving security leaders from multiple organizations.


The measures are part of several changes that Ramakrishna says he has implemented since SolarWinds disclosed a breach of its systems three months ago that resulted in malware called Sunburst being distributed to some 18,000 customers worldwide. A substantially smaller number of them—including FireEye and Mimecast—were subsequently targeted for further compromise.


The intrusion involved attackers gaining access to SolarWinds' software-build environment and injecting the Trojan into automatic updates of the company's Orion network management software.


According to Ramakrishna, the company's investigation shows the attackers somehow gained access to its build environment and managed to inject code dubbed Sunspot into a single source-code file that was fetched from the file system as software was being compiled. The attackers later used Sunspot to inject the Sunburst Trojan into the Orion updates.


The attack had nothing to do with SolarWinds' source-code control systems, and neither did it result in any source code getting changed: "What simply happened was during the automated build process, the Sunspot code, which was sitting in memory ..

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