The major cyberattack that hit some US government departments over the past week also appears to have hit IT companies Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, Belkin and VMware.
The hack was carried out on IT management company SolarWinds and affected the US government and Microsoft, which is a customer of SolarWinds, among others. The Wall Street Journal newspaper now says that some other major tech companies have also been affected.
The malware is said to have spread to computers on the networks of Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, Belkin and VMware.
The full extent of the hack is not yet exact, as the attack and malware are still under investigation. It already seems that attackers got into SolarWinds and injected the company’s Orion IT product with their own code.
Customers who downloaded updates to the product became infected themselves, and a system is very reminiscent of the method used by NotPetya to circumnavigate the world three years ago via a Ukrainian maker of accounting software.
This means that just about every SolarWinds customer has contracted a possible infection. The company itself removed its customer list from its website last week, saying that “fewer than 18,000 companies” have been affected.
So there could be a very significant number. The tech companies do not currently want to say whether or not they have been affected, and they are still investigating their networks themselves.
