SolarWinds Adviser Warned of Lax Security Years Before Massive Hack

A former security adviser at the IT monitoring and network management company SolarWinds Corp. said he warned management of cybersecurity risks and laid out a plan to improve it that was ultimately ignored.

In a 23-page PowerPoint presentation reviewed by Bloomberg News, Ian Thornton-Trump recommended to company executives in 2017 that SolarWinds appoint a senior director of cybersecurity, and said he told them that “the survival of the company depends on an internal commitment to security.”

The following month, he terminated his relationship with the company, saying he believed its leadership wasn’t interested in making changes that would have “meaningful impact.”

Thornton-Trump, as well as a former SolarWinds software engineer who talked to Bloomberg News, said that given the cybersecurity risks at the company, they viewed a major breach as inevitable. Their concerns about SolarWinds are shared by several cybersecurity researchers, who discovered what they described as glaring security lapses at the company, whose software was used in a suspected Russian hacking campaign.

“My belief is that from a security perspective, SolarWinds was an incredibly easy target to hack,” said Thornton-Trump, now the chief information security officer at threat intelligence firm Cyjax Ltd.

Last week, the Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds found itself at the center of the largest cybersecurity attack in recent memory. Suspected Russian hackers breached the internal networks of at least 200 customers, including U.S. government agencies and an as-yet-unknown number of private companies, a cybersecurity firm and people familiar with the investigation told Bloomberg.

In an operation that cybersecurity experts have described as exceedingly sophisticated and hard to detect, the hackers installed malicious code in updates to SolarWinds’s widely used Orion software, which was sent to as many as 18,000 customers.

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