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Business

RUSSIAN HACKERS THRUST TEXAS COMPANY SOLARWINDS INTO THE SPOTLIGHT

The Austin firm whose software has become nearly ubiquitous in the networks of
the federal government and Fortune 500 companies reportedly left its clients
vulnerable.

By Omar L. Gallaga
December 17, 2020 1

SolarWinds' Austin headquarters Kristoffer Tripplaar/Sipa via AP

SolarWinds Worldwide is neither a solar power nor a wind power company, and its
mysterious ways don’t stop there. It isn’t nearly as well-known as Yeti or
Bumble or Indeed or most of the other multibillion-dollar outfits that call
Austin home. It has kept a relatively low profile since it relocated from Tulsa,
Oklahoma, in 2006 seeking greater access to tech industry talent. It doesn’t
sponsor festival stages at Austin City Limits or South by Southwest. You won’t
find its name on billboards, and its southwest Austin office blends anonymously
into the scenery.

Yet SolarWinds, an IT management company valued at more than $6 billion that
earned $938.5 million in revenue last year, was thrust into national headlines
on Sunday with the breaking of bombshell news about a major security breach. A
vulnerability in update software from the company enabled Russian government
hackers to infiltrate the systems of its federal government clients, which
include the U.S. Treasury, the White House, the Pentagon, Los Alamos National
Laboratory, and the departments of Commerce, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland
Security. This vulnerability was reportedly present as early as March.

Malicious code inserted into SolarWinds software updates was distributed via a
hijacked web domain that could have affected as many as 18,000 of its customers,
SolarWinds said in an SEC filing about the hackings. Since the news broke,
SolarWinds has apparently been trying to obscure its long list of clients on its
website, a list that it says also includes 425 companies in the Fortune 500. In
the SEC filing, SolarWinds says its Orion product that introduced the
vulnerability into its clients’ systems accounts for about 45 percent of its
revenue, about $343 million through the first nine months of 2020.

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In addition to Orion, SolarWinds sells a huge suite of products used in IT
departments of 300,000 clients to do everything from monitor the speed of data
networks, manage servers, and secure employee credentials. Orion allows
organizations to install and monitor various SolarWinds products, among other
tasks. SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson said in a statement to Reuters Sunday that
the hack was “a highly-sophisticated, targeted, and manual supply chain attack
by a nation state.” The Orion weakness provided hackers a backdoor to government
and corporate networks.

Such attacks are incredibly difficult to pull off, said Ram Benavides, a
fourteen-year IT security industry veteran who leads the Cyber Threat Hunt Team
for NouSystems Inc., a defense contractor protecting the U.S. Missile Defense
Agency. “It’s a genius way to do things,” he said, referring to the way in which
the hackers found a sort of skeleton key via SolarWinds to access government
agencies and other networks instead of hacking those networks directly. While
so-called supply-chain attacks like this have occurred in the past, he said,
they are not common because of the sophisticated coordination required.
“Nation-states have the time and the resources.”

SolarWinds software, Benavides said, often is used hand in hand with Cisco
Systems hardware and network infrastructure to provide powerful IT management
tools. But as a result of this attack, his team will vet subcontractors and
clients to determine whether they use these products. “From this point on, it’s
something we’ll ask and check: whether they’ve used SolarWinds and what they’ve
done to remediate,” he said.

Several former employees of SolarWinds, who asked not to be named in this story,
said that the company has focused for years on acquiring government contracts.
The fallout from the hackings is obviously as serious a public-relations
nightmare as could happen to a company in its field. “With government work, even
more so than private companies, there’s a huge need to make sure their
applications and their networks are secure,” one former SolarWinds marketing
employee said.

When the company, whose name was coined by one of its early employees, was
founded in 1999, none of its software focused on security. Two of its early
products, Ping Sweep and Trace Route, tracked internet speeds and performance.
As the company says in its own history, “While everyone was distracted by the
impending doom of Y2K, SolarWinds was getting started on our mission to make IT
look easy by offering affordable, purpose-built software tools.”

The past five years at SolarWinds, which has more than three thousand employees
globally, has involved hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of acquisitions,
including Librato, Capzure Technology, LogicNow, SpamExperts, Loggly, and
SentryOne. Those purchases helped the company expand its offerings in areas like
analytics and email monitoring while beefing up its core businesses of network
monitoring and IT management. The acquisition of just one company, Samanage,
cost $350 million.

Several security-industry professionals have stepped forward since the hacking
became public with claims that SolarWinds was made aware of vulnerabilities in
its systems more than a year ago that were not fixed. The company’s success in
making its Orion platform seemingly ubiquitous in government and corporate
systems is now being seen as a liability to the entire IT world.

Former employees characterized “SWI,” as they refer to it, as not a particularly
easy place to work. It’s a high-pressure work environment plagued with office
politics and “clashing personalities of people brought in as ‘change agents,’”
one former manager said. “SWI is the type of place that chews up its employees
and spits them out. I do credit the experience for helping propel my career, but
it wasn’t a place I could stay very long.”

In 2016, the company went private after being acquired for $4.5 billion by
private equity firms Silver Lake Partners and Thoma Bravo. In 2018, SolarWinds
hit the stock market again with an IPO that valued the company at $4.57 billion.
Major changes were afoot before the hacking news, some of them now under
scrutiny by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Silver Lake and Thoma Bravo
sold about $286 million worth of shares in the company shortly before the breach
was disclosed. Thompson announced his resignation two days later. SolarWinds had
recently named Pulse Secure CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna as Thompson’s successor and
had been working to spin off its SolarWinds MSP remote management business into
its own company. A source at the company told Texas Monthly those plans remain
unchanged.

SolarWinds, alongside other Austin software, semiconductor, hardware, and
internet startups, and research and development happening at the University of
Texas, has been part of a recent groundswell of government and defense-related
business happening in Central Texas. In 2018, the Army Futures Command launched
in Austin as a way to promote cross-pollination with the booming local start-up
industry. It is expected to grow to 26,000 employees. This year, defense
contractor BAE announced a $150 million campus in Austin with plans to house
1,400 employees there.

Amber Gunst, CEO of the Austin Technology Council, said that many private
companies in the area keep the extent of their work for the Department of
Defense and other government agencies quiet. Companies with a large Texas
presence such as Accenture and Stratfor have had long rosters of government
clients for decades. But the area’s talent pool and its location have
contributed to lots of new government contracting. “We are so conveniently
located between San Antonio and the Temple–Fort Hood area, where so many former
military personnel have served and want to remain in this area when they
retire,” Gunst said. “It really does make us the perfect area for these
companies to come together and keep our country secure.”

SolarWinds currently has twenty available jobs listed in Texas, including one
particularly relevant to its current crisis: VP Security Architecture.

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light, dark, inverted, and monochrome. Additionally, users can swap color
schemes of titles, texts, and backgrounds with over seven different coloring
options.
3. Animations – epileptic users can stop all running animations with the click
of a button. Animations controlled by the interface include videos, GIFs,
and CSS flashing transitions.
4. Content highlighting – users can choose to emphasize essential elements such
as links and titles. They can also choose to highlight focused or hovered
elements only.
5. Audio muting – users with hearing devices may experience headaches or other
issues due to automatic audio playing. This option lets users mute the
entire website instantly.
6. Cognitive disorders – we utilize a search engine linked to Wikipedia and
Wiktionary, allowing people with cognitive disorders to decipher meanings of
phrases, initials, slang, and others.
7. Additional functions – we allow users to change cursor color and size, use a
printing mode, enable a virtual keyboard, and many other functions.

Assistive technology and browser compatibility

We aim to support as many browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so
our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as
possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major
systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share, including Google
Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS, and NVDA
(screen readers), both for Windows and MAC users.

Notes, comments, and feedback

Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their
needs, there may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are
in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological
solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our
accessibility, adding, updating, improving its options and features, and
developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal
level of accessibility following technological advancements. If you wish to
contact the website’s owner, please use the website's form

Hide Accessibility Interface? Please note: If you choose to hide the
accessibility interface, you won't be able to see it anymore, unless you clear
your browsing history and data. Are you sure that you wish to hide the
interface?
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