Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith spoke during the Web Summit 2017 in Lisbon on November 8, 2017. (Photo: PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP via Getty Images)
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UPDATED 2:30 PM PT – Monday, February 15, 2021
The Microsoft president said that the SolarWinds hack was the biggest the world has ever seen. In an interview on Sunday, Brad Smith said the malicious operation required more than 1,000 engineers.
Hackers have breached SolarWinds software, giving them access to various companies and government offices. The United States government has said that Russian criminals are the likely culprits and added the hack that aims to collect data, instead of destroying it.
ARCHIVE – This August 4, 2009 archive photo shows the United States Chamber of Commerce building in Washington. The White House said a senior national security officer is leading the U.S. response to a massive breach by government departments and private corporations discovered last year. (AP Photo / Manuel Balce Ceneta, Archive.)
Smith said the malware was installed through an enterprise-wide update.
“I think from a software engineering perspective, I think it’s fair to say that this is the biggest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen,” said Smith. “When this update was sent to 18,000 organizations worldwide, so was this malware.”
Cybersecurity experts are trying to determine the full extent of the attack and said it would be difficult to completely remove infiltrators from the system.