A Solorigate is an attack that took place on the SolarWinds software. Technically, the attacker got into a remote management software server of the company and somehow injected a backdoor into the software update of Orion. And as soon as the SolarWinds started pushing the update to its customers, the backdoor induced software was deployed onto the customer systems- thus letting the hackers sniff out the operations being carried out of the systems loaded with the software update; leading to espionage.
The highlight of this whole cyber attack is that it took place in the 3Q of 2018 and the federal authorities were updated about the espionage in November 2020 through an alert issued by Cybersecurity firm FireEye.
Microsoft, a world renowned company, has also become a victim of the said cyber attack as it released an update at the end of December that SolarWinds Attackers could have accessed its source code by infiltrating its servers. However, the good news is that the source code was in read-only mode and so the cyber crooks could have just read or screen-printed the content. The Windows software giant did not make it clear on whether its update servers were also impacted in the incident- that could spell doom to millions of Windows OS users.
Wall Street Journal along with Reuters have trumpeted that the attack was the work of Russian Intelligence. But the trump administration denied it and tried to divert the blame towards china.
Joe Biden, who is said to take the President-ship from Donald Trump on January 20th,2021 stated that he would launch a neutral probe into the whole incident in which over 250 federal, private and public companies could have been affected.
