A cybersecurity adviser for the company said that he quit after his recommendations to strengthen security were ignored. Chinese hackers appear to have exploited a separate vulnerability in the company’s products to break into U.S. For a while, in 2019, the update server’s password for SolarWinds’s network management software was reported to be “solarwinds123.” Russian hackers were able to breach SolarWinds’s own email system and lurk there for months. The company outsourced much of its software engineering to cheaper programmers overseas, even though that typically increases the risk of security vulnerabilities. SolarWinds certainly seems to have underspent on security. The company is owned in large part by Silver Lake and Thoma Bravo, private-equity firms known for extreme cost-cutting.

Like all for-profit corporations, SolarWinds aims to increase shareholder value by minimizing costs and maximizing profit. The modern market economy, which aggressively rewards corporations for short-term profits and aggressive cost-cutting, is also part of the problem: Its incentive structure all but ensures that successful tech companies will end up selling unsecure products and services. But to see the problem only as a technical shortcoming is to miss the bigger picture. government deserves considerable blame, of course, for its inadequate cyberdefense. The Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on the breach on Tuesday. It was a huge attack, with major implications for U.S. government agencies such as the Homeland Security Department and State Department, American nuclear research labs, government contractors, IT companies and nongovernmental agencies around the world. The hack gave the attackers access to the computer networks of some 18,000 of SolarWinds’s customers, including U.S. Early in 2020, cyberspace attackers apparently working for the Russian government compromised a piece of widely used network management software made by a company called SolarWinds.

Solarwinds world map