According to a New York Times report, over 250 organizations, including government agencies and private businesses, were impacted – The list keeps growing.
SolarWinds Attack
In December 2020, the cyberworld was rocked with the news of an elite group of hackers, possibly having Russian backing, infiltrating the networks of a Texas-based software provider SolarWinds. The hackers managed to trojanize the company’s most widely used software.
What followed is an extensive espionage campaign involving dozens of government institutions and businesses within the US and in other parts of the world. SolarWinds’ Orion Platform software secretly dispensed malware to spy on the users and extract documents containing sensitive data.
More than 250 Organizations Impacted
Previously, experts identified 40 agencies that were impacted by the attacks. However, The New York Times reported over the weekend that those threat actors gained access to more than 250 organizations’ networks.
Some of the attack victims identified so far include several US federal agencies such as the DHS, the State Department, Commerce Department, the National Institutes of Health, Treasury, and high-profile tech firms Microsoft, VMware, and Cisco.
The Most Devastating Breach Ever
Apart from the IT world, no one had any idea about a company named SolarWinds before the attack. It turned out that the company provided IT management solutions to hundreds of top US and European federal agencies and corporations from every sector.
