Wednesday, December 15, 2021
On December 13, 2020, the SolarWinds hack came to light, revealing that suspected foreign spies had quietly breached US agencies and companies for months.
On this day in 2020, word broke that hackers had slipped malicious code into a routine software update from a company called SolarWinds, used by thousands of businesses and government agencies. The intruders, widely believed to be foreign spies, had been quietly inside sensitive networks for months before anyone noticed.
The unsettling part was the method. The victims had done nothing careless, they had simply installed a trusted update, and the attack rode in through the supply chain of software itself. It was espionage rather than sabotage this time, but the same doorway could have been used to do far more damage.
The lesson is to assume that no system is perfectly secure and to build in resilience. Offline backups, a healthy skepticism about the tools we depend on, and household plans that do not collapse if a digital service goes down are the everyday answer to this quieter kind of man made disaster.
