Security News > 2020 > December > How to combat future cyberattacks following the SolarWinds breach
How can and should governments respond to and better protect themselves from serious cyberattacks from hostile nations?
The attackers who exploited a security flaw in SolarWinds' Orion network monitoring software to breach government agencies and large companies were almost certainly acting on behalf of a nation-state.
When the culprit is another country or one sponsored by another government, how should the targeted nations react? How does a country like the US respond, both defensively and offensively, to a Russia in the event of such an attack?
The cyberattacks have sent shockwaves across the US government, leading the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to label the incident as posing a "Grave risk" to the federal, state, and local governments as well as to critical infrastructure providers and the private sector.
Key security agencies and personnel in the US government have feverishly been discussing how this breach could have happened and how to deal with it.