'About 18,000 organizations around the world downloaded network management tools that contained a backdoor that spies believed to be backed by the Russian government could use to install additional malware that stole sensitive data, the tools provider, SolarWinds, said on Monday. The disclosure from Austin, Texas-based software maker SolarWinds, came a day after the US government revealed a major security breach hitting federal agencies and private companies. The US Departments of Treasury, Commerce, and Homeland Security departments were among the federal agencies on the receiving end of attacks that gave access to email and other sensitive resources. Federal agencies using the software were instructed on Sunday to disconnect systems that run the software and perform a forensic analysis of their networks. Premiere security firm FireEye says it was breached by nation-state hackers Security firm FireEye, which last week disclosed a serious breach of its own network, said that hackers backed by a nation state compromised a SolarWinds software update mechanism and then used it to infect selected customers who installed a backdoored version of the company’s Orion network management tool. The backdoor infected customers who installed an update from March to June of this year, SolarWinds said in a document filed on Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. SolarWinds, which said SolarWinds has about 300,000 Orion customers, put the number of affected customers at about 18,000.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/12/18000-organizations-d... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/