SolarWinds' security practices in the years leading up to a major cyber-attack by suspected Russian hackers, who leveraged the company’s software to infiltrate government agencies and private-sector companies, were questioned by lawmakers in Washington.
At a Friday hearing on the hack by two House committees, Representative Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi and chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, asked SolarWinds representatives about reports of lax security at the company.
Kevin Thompson, who served as chief executive officer at the time of the breach, defended SolarWinds, saying it had beefed security in recent years and spent more than most technology companies of similar size.
“I believe that we have, over the history of time, taken security seriously -- security of our internal systems, and the secure development of our products,” said Thompson, the former SolarWinds CEO.
The cyber-attack was revealed in December after FireEye discovered it while investigating a breach of its own. The hackers implanted malicious code into SolarWinds’ popular Orion software, and as many as 18,000 customers received it while updating the software. Far fewer were actually targeted for secondary attacks -- about 100 companies and nine US agencies, according to the White House.
A persistent question has been how the hackers originally breached SolarWinds. At the hearing, SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna said the company was still investigating but had narrowed it to three possible methods.
The hackers may have used a technique called “password spraying,” where the attackers “spray” passwords at a large volume of usernames. A second possibility was that the hackers stole credentials, he said, while the third was a breach of a third-party application used by SolarWinds.
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