Many companies still expose SolarWinds Orion to the internet and have failed to take action following the disclosure of the massive SolarWinds breach, according to RiskRecon, a Mastercard company that specializes in risk assessment.
Threat actors believed to be backed by Russia breached Texas-based IT management firm SolarWinds and used that access to deliver a piece of malware named Sunburst to roughly 18,000 customers who had been using the company’s Orion monitoring product. A few hundred victims that presented an interest to the hackers received other payloads that provided deeper access into their environments.
A second, apparently unrelated threat group believed to be operating out of China also targeted SolarWinds, delivering a piece of malware named Supernova. The delivery of Supernova required access to the targeted network and involved exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in Orion, which SolarWinds patched shortly after its existence came to light.
RiskRecon on Friday said it observed 1,785 organizations exposing Orion to the internet on December 13, 2020, shortly after the breach came to light, and the number dropped to 1,330 by February 1, 2021. However, only 8% of these companies have applied the Orion update (2020.2.4) released by SolarWinds in response to the breach.
