FBI, CISA and Office of DNI Release Statement — Are Pursing Significant Cybersecurity Incident with SolarWinds Orion Products via @gatewaypundit https://t.co/I418Z67R9Q
— Jim Hoft (@gatewaypundit) December 17, 2020
The FBI, office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have announced they will be jointly leading an investigation into the SolarWinds cybersecurity incident announced earlier this week.
“Over the course of the past several days, the FBI, CISA, and ODNI have become aware of a significant and ongoing cybersecurity campaign,” a joint statement put out by the agencies reads. “Pursuant to Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 41, the FBI, CISA, and ODNI have formed a Cyber Unified Coordination Group (UCG) to coordinate a whole-of-government response to this significant cyber incident.”
SolarWinds acknowledged its systems “experienced a highly sophisticated, manual supply chain attack on SolarWinds Orion Platform software builds for versions 2019.4 HF 5 through 2020.2.1, released between March 2020 and June 2020,” on Monday.
SolarWinds is a networking software company that helps companies manage their IT infrastructure. A breach of its systems would give would-be hackers remote access to the network of any organization that uses SolarWinds, which would allow them to steal information.
The U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments networks were among those breached. Authorities believe the hack was conducted by a foreign government.
One of the companies that uses SolarWinds products is Dominion Systems, the maker of voting machines used across the U.S.