(Source: Mike via Flickr) The SolarWinds supply chain attack should prompt federal agencies and others to rethink how they approach security issues - especially identity and access management, according to a breakdown of the attack presented this week by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
At NIST s Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board meeting, Jay Gazlay, a technical strategist with CISA who has been examining the attack since it was first disclosed in December 2020, presented an analysis of what the agency has learned about the attack to date. That included a detailed timeline of how the hackers implanted a backdoor in a software update for SolarWind s Orion network monitoring platform. The update with the backdoor was eventually installed by about 18,000 of the company s customers.
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Microsoft issued emergency software patches on Tuesday for four zero-day vulnerabilities in its Exchange email server, one of the most widely used pieces of enterprise infrastructure.
The company says it believes the flaws have been exploited by a China-based group it calls Hafnium, which is seeking to gain persistent access to email systems. Microsoft typically issues patches for Windows and other products on the second Tuesday of every month, but it makes exceptions for security vulnerabilities that are deemed particularly dangerous.
Although Microsoft describes the attacks as limited and targeted, there are already indications that many other hacking groups are mounting attacks hoping to catch slow-patching organizations off guard. The flaws appear to have been exploited since at least early January.
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A pair of U.S. House committees held their first public hearings into the SolarWinds attack, with lawmakers and witnesses offering support for expanding federal