Intern's password 'solarwind123' may be reason for biggest hack

The highly-sophisticated supply chain attack ever, Which targeted SolarWinds may be result of a Intern’s poor choice of password.

Current and former top executives of the Texas-based software services SolarWinds are blaming a company intern for a critical lapse in password security that apparently went unnoticed for years.

The said password “solarwinds123” of a intern was originally believed to have been publicly accessible via a GitHub repository since 17, June 2018, before the misconfiguration was addressed on 22, November 2019.

In a hearing before the House Committees on SolarWinds on Friday, CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna testified that the password had been in use as early as 2017.

Till date, at least nine govt agencies and 100 big private sector companies have been breached in what’s being described as one of the most sophisticated and well-planned supply-chain hack that involved injecting the malicious implant into the Orion Software Platform with the goal of compromising its customers.

It’s believed that at least 18,000 customers of SolarWinds have received trojanized Orion update.

SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna said they are also exploring with other theory that the brute-force guessing of passwords, as well as the possibility the hackers could have entered via compromised third-party software.

The seven other breached agencies are the Departments of State, Justice, Commerce, Homeland Security, Energy, Treasury, and the National Institutes of Health.

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