The cyber attack on SolarWinds is the work of more than a thousand cybercriminals. This has been said by Microsoft President Brad Smith who described the recent SolarWinds hack as “the largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen” on US news show 60 Minutes.
“When we analysed everything that we saw at Microsoft, we asked ourselves how many engineers have probably worked on these attacks. And the answer we came to was, well, certainly more than 1,000,” Smith said.
The ‘SolarWinds hack’ has been targeted against tech companies and a range of the US government agencies. Microsoft was also exposed to the hack. 4,032 lines of malicious code were at the core of the crack.
Without explicitly pointing fingers at Russia, Smith compared the SolarWinds hack to attacks on Ukraine that had been generally attributed to Russia which, however, denies that it was behind the SolarWinds cyberattack.
“What we are seeing is the first use of this supply chain disruption tactic against the United States,” Smith said. “But it’s not the first time we’ve witnessed it. The Russian government really developed this tactic in Ukraine.”