Microsoft last week updated its account of Solorigate, the large cyberespionage campaign generally attributed to Russia's SVR. Redmond says the threat actors gained access to several of the company's source code repositories. Microsoft reports that it detected no evidence of any alteration to its code, that the infestations found have been contained and remediated, and that the company's "assume breach" approach to security limited the damage. CISA has directed all Federal organizations to upgrade their SolarWinds Orion instances to the latest version.
The New York Times' review of Solorigate puts the tally of affected networks, both government and corporate, at around two-hundred-fifty. The campaign is thought to have succeeded, in part, because it was staged through servers in the US at a time when NSA and US Cyber Command were focused on election security and their own penetration of hostile infrastructure. The cyberespionage is unusually troubling because the persistence it established could amount to battlespace preparation for future destructive attacks.
In the UK, the Westminster Magistrates’ Court has blocked extradition of WikiLeaks impresario Julian Assange to the US. TechCrunch reports that extradition was denied on the grounds that sending Mr. Assange to the US would be sufficiently oppressive to risk driving him to suicide. The US has fourteen days to appeal, and has announced its intention of filing additional charges against Mr. Assange. The Washington Post says the decision's rejection of claims that the charges amounted to a violation of free-speech guarantees amounted to a partial win for the US.