After Russian intelligence launched one of the most devastating cyber espionage attacks in history against U.S. government agencies, the Biden administration set up a new board and tasked it to figure out what happened — and tell the public.

State hackers had infiltrated SolarWinds, an American software company that serves the U.S. government and thousands of American companies. The intruders used malicious code and a flaw in a Microsoft product to steal intelligence from the National Nuclear Security Administration, National Institutes of Health and the Treasury Department in what Microsoft President Brad Smith called “the largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen.”

The president issued an executive order establishing the Cyber Safety Review Board in May 2021 and ordered it to start work by reviewing the SolarWinds attack.

But for reasons that experts say remain unclear, that never happened.

Nor did the board probe SolarWinds for its second report.

A full, public accounting of what happened in the Solar Winds case would have been devastating to Microsoft. ProPublica recently revealed that Microsoft had long known about — but refused to address — a flaw used in the hack. The tech company’s failure to act reflected a corporate culture that prioritized profit over security and left the U.S. government vulnerable, a whistleblower said.

  • kubica@fedia.io
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    6 months ago

    Certain companies are untouchable, reminds me of something else going on, but whatever.

    • danc4498@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      It’s a problem that the wealthy can control both what happens and the narrative surrounding what happened.

    • Optional@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      A full, public accounting of what happened in the Solar Winds case would have been devastating to Microsoft. ProPublica recently revealed that Microsoft had long known about — but refused to address — a flaw used in the hack. The tech company’s failure to act reflected a corporate culture that prioritized profit over security and left the U.S. government vulnerable, a whistleblower said.

      Same shit different decade

  • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
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    6 months ago

    A tech company that prioritizes money over security?

    Well that’s certainly a new and unexpected twist!

    (I don’t know if /s is necessary, but just to make sure: /s as fuck)

  • FarFarAway@startrek.website
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    6 months ago

    Well it doesnt help that Microsoft got hacked, in January, by the same group that did the Solarwinds hack. It even affected state government. I wonder if someone doing… anything, could have prevented this.

    I know the offical story is a weak password, but even the article questions that.

  • culprit
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    6 months ago

    I wonder if this is related to US Feds wanting to keep certain zero-day exploits undisclosed for their own purposes. This is something that has happened a few times already. NSA and the like will maintain silence on exploits they use on targets, or even force implementation of backdoors via quasi-legal means.

    There’s almost no reason to trust closed-source non-free software anymore really, especially from US-aligned corps.

  • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Maybe I’m not remembering things right, but the solarwinds attack was a supply chain attack. Their upstream code was manipulated internally which resulted in a downstream malicious dll.

    I’m not sure how that’s MS’s fault.