Malicious Domain in SolarWinds Hack Turned into ‘Killswitch’

[Bjyda]

Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds disclosed this week that a compromise of its software update servers earlier this year may have resulted in malicious code being pushed to nearly 18,000 customers of its Orion platform. Many U.S. federal agencies and Fortune 500 firms use(d) Orion to monitor the health of their IT networks.

On Dec. 13, cyber incident response firm FireEye published a detailed writeup on the malware infrastructure used in the SolarWinds compromise, presenting evidence that the Orion software was first compromised back in March 2020. FireEye said hacked networks were seen communicating with a malicious domain name — avsvmcloud[.]com — one of several domains the attackers had set up to control affected systems.

As first reported here on Tuesday, there were signs over the past few days that control over the domain had been transferred to Microsoft. Asked about the changeover, Microsoft referred questions to FireEye and to GoDaddy, the current domain name registrar for the malicious site.

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