[co-author: Ken Fishkin]
As reported by Bloomberg and other news outlets, a major cyber security intrusion attributed to Russian state hackers, known by the nicknames APT29 or Cozy Bear, has sent cybersecurity experts into emergency mode as they work to determine whether their clients have been impacted by this breach. The same group of hackers attacked the State Department and the White House email servers back in 2014. The attack appears to have originated with an intrusion into SolarWinds IT Orion Platform, which is utilized by many companies to manage their IT operations. Specifically, SolarWinds Orion software versions 2019.4 HF 5 through 2020.2.1, released between March and June 2020, are considered compromised, and companies are being strongly urged to take immediate action by following SolarWinds’ mitigations.
SolarWinds is currently estimating that as many as 18,000 entities, including companies and government agencies, have been impacted by the hack and may be facing known and unknown breaches and cyber intrusions. Now is the time for clients to reevaluate their data security systems as well as third-party risk management programs. For those clients using…
