Verify and report
This week, read about how the employees of FireEye and SolarWinds responded to a hack and where a timely verification would have changed the outcome.
SolarWinds hack — Supply chain hack
The SolarWinds hack was first spotted by someone at FireEye, a cybersecurity company. A staff member noticed that an employee signed in using their username and password but a new phone number.
This suspicious behavior set off alarms.
The staff member needed to verify if the employee had a new phone number. In this case, they did not. Once this was confirmed and they realized that an attack was underway, people jumped into action.
- SolarWinds is a software company. In this hack, network management software was compromised.
- Many large organizations such as Microsoft, Intel and even the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were using SolarWinds. This meant their organizations were compromised too.
- Sudhakar Ramakrishna, CEO of SolarWinds, immediately announced this issue to the world. He said, “The right thing to do is report.”
- What is a supply chain hack? A supply chain hack is an attack on one part of a supply chain. This hack is efficient because it can get hackers into multiple organizations quickly.
