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Staffers say the CEO of SolarWinds, which is based in Austin, Texas, cut security measure to save costs and the company moved several engineering offices to Eastern Europe.īut that move may have made the company vulnerable to the breach as some of the compromised SolarWinds software was engineered there and Russian intelligence operatives are deeply rooted in that region. When his recommendations were ignored, he left the company a month later.
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He said he gave a PowerPoint presentation to three SolarWinds executives urging them to install a cybersecurity senior director because he thought a major breach was inevitable, Bloomberg reported. Thornton-Trump said he urged management in 2017 to take a more aggressive approach with its internal security, warning that a cybersecurity episode would be 'catastrophic', according to a New York Times report published Saturday.
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In the breach, hackers gained access to government and private networks by inserting malicious code in recent versions of SolarWinds' premier software product, Orion. In late December it was revealed that the sprawling cyber-espionage attack led by state-backed Russian hackers affected more than 250 US federal agencies and private companies beginning as early as October 2019, but went undetected for months. Ian Thornton-Trump, a former cybersecurity adviser at the firm, also claims the firm's moving of some operations to Eastern Europe may have exposed it to the massive Russian hack.