SolarWinds Sued Over Russian Hack

A SolarWinds investor filed a class-action lawsuit against the software vendor, its CEO, and CFO alleging that the company and its top executives failed to disclose security vulnerabilities that led up to a massive hack of its Orion platform update. A SolarWinds investor filed a class-action lawsuit against the software vendor, its CEO, and CFO alleging that the company and its top executives failed to disclose security vulnerabilities that led up to a massive hack of its Orion platform update. Investor Timothy Bremer filed the lawsuit earlier this week in Texas federal court on behalf of SolarWinds’ shareholders. The suit demands that SolarWinds pay damages suffered after the company’s stock plummeted following the December breach disclosure. It alleges that SolarWinds, former CEO Kevin Thompson, and CFO Barton Kalsu made “false and/or misleading” statements in filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in February, May, August, and November 2020. “Specifically, defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) since mid-2020, SolarWinds Orion monitoring products had a vulnerability that allowed hackers to compromise the server upon which the products ran; (2) SolarWinds’ update server had an easily accessible password of ‘solarwinds123’,” the lawsuit says. On Jan. 4, Sudhakar Ramakrishna replaced Thompson as SolarWinds CEO. The company announced the new hire just days before disclosing the breach. On Dec. 13 SolarWinds disclosed that a nation-state attacker inserted malicious code into its Orion software update issued between March and June 2020. While the full scope of the hack remains unknown, a report over the weekend said cybersecurity officials believe it hit about 250 United States’ federal agencies and large corporations. This includes FireEye, Microsoft, Cisco, Nvidia, Intel, VMware, and Cox Communications, among other companies, as well as federal agencies including the U.S. Commerce and Treasury Departments, Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Sandia National Laboratories, the Office of Secure Transportation at NNSA, and the Richland Field Office of the DOE. Yesterday, the FBI and other agencies said Russia was likely responsible for the attack, although the hackers’ origins has been widely reported since Dec. 14.