Security News > 2020 > December > U.S. Treasury, Commerce Depts. Hacked Through SolarWinds Compromise
Communications at the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments were reportedly compromised by a supply chain attack on SolarWinds, a security vendor that helps the federal government and a range of Fortune 500 companies monitor the health of their IT networks.
In a security advisory, Austin, Texas based 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.".
Malicious code added to an Orion software update may have gone undetected by antivirus software and other security tools on host systems thanks in part to guidance from SolarWinds itself.
Reuters reports the supply chain attack on SolarWinds is connected to a broad campaign that also involved the recently disclosed hack at FireEye, wherein hackers gained access to a slew of proprietary tools the company uses to help customers find security weaknesses in their computers and networks.
In its own advisory, FireEye said multiple updates poisoned with a malicious backdoor program were digitally signed with a SolarWinds certificate from March through May 2020, and posted to the SolarWindws update website.