Cyber attackers exploiting software updates to SolarWinds’ widely used IT performance monitoring platform

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center are alerting organizations to a global cyberattack using a hidden back door or “trojanized” legitimate updates to the SolarWinds Orion performance monitoring platform to access public and private networks.

The attacks then retrieve and execute commands that can transfer and execute files, profile the system, reboot the machine and disable system services. For more on the cyber campaign, see the related advisories by SolarWinds and cybersecurity company FireEye and visit FireEye’s GitHub page for detection countermeasures.

“The SolarWinds update compromise, combined with the related breach of FireEye hacking tools last week, greatly accelerates the cyber risk to every organization in every sector,” said John Riggi, AHA’s senior advisor for cybersecurity and risk. “It is important to note that the corrupted SolarWinds Orion platform updates were released between March and June 2020 and a patch is not yet available to mitigate the full extent of the compromise. Organizations running SolarWinds should consider isolating any related infrastructure and block all internet access from servers and devices running SolarWinds software.” 

For more on this and other cybersecurity and risk issues, hospital and health system leaders may contact Riggi at jriggi@aha.org.