FBI Probing SolarWinds Hack That Affected Government Networks

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating the hack of SolarWinds technology, which caused a breach of U.S. government systems, authorities confirmed Wednesday.

The SolarWinds Orion platform, which was compromised, is used by all five branches of the U.S. military and numerous government agencies.

Networks within the federal government were affected by the breach, which was done by inserting malware, or malicious code, into software updates for Orion.

CISA issued an emergency directive late Dec. 13 after news of the hack broke, ordering all government agencies using the vulnerable products to disconnect the affected devices from the Internet.

"Tonight's directive is intended to mitigate potential compromises within federal civilian networks, and we urge all our partners-in the public and private sectors-to assess their exposure to this compromise and to secure their networks against any exploitation."

Microsoft has said it is monitoring the situation "Surrounding the discovery of a sophisticated attack" that included compromised binaries from SolarWinds that "Could be used by attackers to remotely access devices." Customers were told to immediately isolate the affected device and investigate whether it was breached.

FireEye told Krebs the domain transfer was part of a response to the hack, a bid to try to stop networks that may have been affected by the vulnerable software from communicating with the attackers.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/fbi-probing-solarwinds-hack-that-affected-government-networks_3622356.html