Josh Wieder

Full disclosure: I've been employed by several companies that were customers and/or vendors of SolarWinds. However, I have never been employed by SolarWinds and I was not compensated for this post. On December 13th, digital security firm FireEye published a post to their blog with the comprehensive title " Highly Evasive Attacker Leverages SolarWinds Supply Chain to Compromise Multiple Global Victims With SUNBURST Backdoor ". The post identified a digitally-signed component of the Orion software, SolarWinds.Orion.Core.BusinessLayer.dll, that contained a backdoor. Multiple signed updates contained additional malware. Traffic from infected hosts was disguised using traffic resembling normal SolarWinds activity and avoided using IPs that were part of non-U.S. netblocks or assignments registered to "bullet proof" hosts that are frequented by criminals. Orion's compromised distribution platform was then leveraged to infect a wide variety of organizations. Accordi...

Yesterday, on December 14th, all services associated with Google Workspace (AKA GSuite - or for those who aren't familiar with it, what is essentially Google's paid "business" services) went offline for roughly an hour from 7AM to 8AM Eastern time. Users typically first encountered the error when attempting to send email or after receiving an error indicating that their account could "not be found" when attempting to login to Google services.  Other impacted services include Youtube and the Google Nest home security service.  Google's official statement to the press described the cause in extremely general terms: Services requiring users to log in experienced high error rates during this period,” a Google spokesperson said. “The authentication system issue was resolved at (7:32 a.m. EST). All services are now restored. We apologize to everyone affected, and we will conduct a thorough follow-up review to ensure this problem cannot recur in the future. ...