Alleged Chinese hackers spy on US government using SolarWinds bug

A tech bug in SolarWinds Corp which was used by alleged Chinese hackers to help break into U.S. government computers last year has been declared a national security emergency by U.S. lawmakers, Reuters reported. 

The U.S. government institutions and biggest businesses were exposed to a hyper-sophisticated cyberattack which was alarming at the same time.

A government payroll department of the U.S., the National Finance Center, Department of Agriculture were among the affected agencies, creating concerns that data on thousands of federal workers may have been hacked.

SolarWinds, formerly a little-known but important network security software developer, is trying to learn how the hackers first broke into the network of the business and when it happened exactly.

The security breach by the alleged Chinese party is different from the one that the United States accused Russian government agents of exploiting by hijacking the company's Orion network surveillance software to hack up to 18,000 SolarWinds clients, including critical federal agencies.

Because of its complexity, reach and the way it violated the trusted relationship between technology providers and the services they provide, investigators describe the hack as one of the worst in U.S. history.

The number of organizations that were compromised by the alleged Chinese hackers could not be identified. The Reuter’s sources, who spoke to address ongoing investigations, said the attackers used information networks and hacking techniques previously deployed by Chinese state-backed cyberspies.

SolarWinds said that it was aware of a single customer that was compromised by the second set of hackers but to show who was responsible, it had not discovered anything definitive. The business added that the attackers had not gained access to their internal systems and that in December it had released an update to correct the bug, Reuters reported.

While the alleged Russian hackers infiltrated deep into the SolarWinds network and hid a "back door" in software updates from Orion that were then delivered to consumers, the alleged Chinese team exploited a separate bug in the code of Orion to further spread through networks they had already breached, the sources told to Reuters.

The incident influenced hundreds of SolarWinds' clients, including large technology firms such as Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., as well as the Finance, Judiciary, Transportation, Commerce, State, Homeland Security, Labor and Business departments.

Content Contributor & Source: Reuters