Little-known SolarWinds gets scrutiny over hack, stock sales

Before this week, few people were aware of SolarWinds, a Texas-based software company providing vital computer network monitoring services to major corporations and government agencies worldwide. Founded in 1999 by two brothers in Tulsa, Oklahoma, ahead of the feared turn-of-the-millennium Y2K computer bug, the company’s website says its first product “arrived on the scene to help IT pros quell everyone’s world-ending fears.” This time, its products are the ones instilling fears. The company on Sunday began alerting about 33,000 of its customers that an “outside nation state” — widely suspected to be Russia — injected malicious code into some updated versions of its premier product, Orion. The Pentagon said in a statement Wednesday that it had so far found “no evidence of compromise” on its classified and unclassified networks from the “evolving cyber incident.” The NSA, DHS and FBI briefed the House Intelligence Committee Wednesday on what was widely considered a serious intelligence failure, and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin told CNN “this is virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States, and we should take that seriously.” Among business sectors scrambling to protect their systems and assess potential theft of information were the electric power industry, defense contractors and telecommunications firms. Moody’s Investors Service said Wednesday it was looking to downgrade its rating for the company, citing the “potential for reputational damage, material loss of customers, a slowdown in business performance and high remediation and legal costs.” SolarWinds’ longtime CEO, Kevin Thompson, had months earlier indicated that he would be leaving at the end of the year as the company explored spinning off one of its divisions.