State sponsored cyberattacks: what lawyers need to know
Sunburst: a moment of reckoning
Towards the end of 2020, the National Security Agency (NSA) issued a warning, claiming that “Russian state-sponsored malicious cyber actors” had essentially hacked into a piece of network management software belonging to SolarWinds, which was installed on networks belonging to US government agencies and almost all Fortune 500 companies. Following discovery of this hack, dubbed Sunburst, the US department of Homeland Security promptly ordered all federal agencies to disconnect from the platform.
According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), the hack began in at least March 2020, and those responsible had “demonstrated patience,…