It is not an understatement to say that the SolarWinds hack is, in Microsoft President Brad Smith’s words, “the largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen”. At least 18.000 customers of software company SolarWinds were affected by a backdoor that allowed state-sponsored hackers to compromise U.S. government agencies, leading technology firms, and other notable targets worldwide. The full extent of the hacking campaign is still being investigated, and its consequences are still unravelling.

What is clear though is that the SolarWinds cyber-attack has been first and foremost a supply chain security failure. Hackers injected malware into updates of SolarWinds’ Orion IT monitoring and management tool, which is used by over 30.000 clients from the public and private sectors around the world. The supply chain backdoor remained undetected for several months, until the breach was finally revealed by Microsoft and security firm FireEye in December 2020. However, the cyberattack is still ongoing as hackers continue exploiting vulnerabilities in the Orion technology.