Unpacking the SolarWinds Cyber Attack

The Verge's Nilay Patel is joined by Joseph Menn, a cybersecurity reporter at Reuters and author of the new book Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World. Nilay and Joseph talk about a very big problem in US cybersecurity today: the SolarWinds hack.

In December, it was reported that a group of hackers, likely from the Russian government, had gotten into SolarWinds, a dominant player in network management software, and then used that access to breach everything from Microsoft to the US government.

The story is part of a back-and-forth game of hacking the United States and its rivals that have been escalating for years. Pay attention to how quickly this conversation with Joseph becomes about really big issues like how deeply our military and security agencies should be integrated with private company security. There aren’t a lot of easy answers here, but it’s clear that change is coming with the Biden administration.

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