On Thursday, the Biden administration announced a roster of tough sanctions against Russia as part of what it characterized as the "seen and unseen" response to the SolarWinds breach. We are still conducting the investigation." "If you then take 18,000 and start sifting through it, the actual number of impacted customers is far less. "Eighteen thousand was our best estimate of who may have downloaded the code between March and June of 2020," Sudhakar Ramakrishna, SolarWinds president and CEO, told NPR. Hackers believed to be directed by the Russian intelligence service, the SVR, used that routine software update to slip malicious code into Orion's software and then used it as a vehicle for a massive cyberattack against America. The routine update, it turns out, is no longer so routine. Customers simply had to log into the company's software development website, type a password and then wait for the update to land seamlessly onto their servers. It was supposed to provide the regular fare - bug fixes, performance enhancements - to the company's popular network management system, a software program called Orion that keeps a watchful eye on all the various components in a company's network. Last spring, a Texas-based company called SolarWinds made one such software update available to its customers. The next morning, rather like the shoemaker and the elves, our software is magically transformed. A pop-up window announces its arrival and all that is required of us is to plug everything in before bed. The routine software update may be one of the most familiar and least understood parts of our digital lives. "This release includes bug fixes, increased stability and performance improvements." Samri members, helped by police and militia, then went from house to house carrying out attacks, it said.An NPR investigation into the SolarWinds attack reveals a hack unlike any other, launched by a sophisticated adversary intent on exploiting the soft underbelly of our digital lives. The attack began with the execution of an Amhara farmer, who was killed in front of his family before his house was burned down and his corpse set on the fire, the report said, citing interviews with the man’s wife and eyewitnesses. On the morning of the attack, local police began shutting all exit points from Mai Kadra and checking identity cards of residents to “differentiate people of non-Tigray origin from the rest,” the report said, citing residents.īy the afternoon, a Tigrayan youth group identified in the report as “Samri,” together with local police and militiamen, went to a neighbourhood in the town where most non-Tigrayans live, it said. The Ethiopian commission said people of Amhara origin, many of them seasonal workers on the area’s sesame and millet farms, had been subjected to “great fear and pressure” from the first day of the conflict, and had been prohibited from moving freely in the town. The TPLF have previously denied any responsibility for the killings.Īmnesty declined to comment on the Ethiopian commission’s findings. Reuters was unable to reach local Tigray leaders for comment. Reuters was not immediately able to verify the accounts because internet and phone connections to the region are down and access tightly controlled since fighting erupted between government troops and forces of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) on Nov. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed called in a tweet for “the international community to condemn these atrocious acts of crimes against humanity.” It called the attack a “massacre,” saying accounts from survivors and witnesses suggested that the killings were part of a “widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population.” 9 attack - first reported by rights group Amnesty International - was aimed at residents of non-Tigrayan origin, the commission said. FILE PHOTO: Ethiopians who fled the ongoing fighting in Tigray region, gather in Hamdayet village near the Sudan-Ethiopia border, eastern Kassala state, Sudan November 22, 2020.
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