By Eva Lorenz and Taylor Ey

SolarWinds made a name for itself as the developer of tools for network monitoring that help small and large companies efficiently run their environment. While not a security-focused company from a product standpoint, the understanding was that the code behind SolarWinds’ tools was protected as intellectual property and that updates were safe to run until it turned out that both of these assumptions were wrong.

How Was the Compromise Detected?

In late 2020, FireEye, a company focused on cybersecurity and internationally involved in helping companies post cyber incident, detected some unusual activity on the FireEye network. FireEye detected it was hacked after the attackers tried to register a device to FireEye’s multi-factor authentication system using stolen credentials. The system then notified the employee, whose credentials were stolen, and alerted the FireEye security team of this new device. This notice triggered an internal investigation to learn who was trying to register this device. FireEye performed in-depth code analysis and determined that the intrusion originated with a SolarWinds product called Orion. Some analysts believe that attacking FireEye was a mistake by the attackers since it sped up detection of the SolarWinds hack.
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