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by IgorBog61650384 1956 days ago
The SolarWinds incident was detect because of bad opsec by the operators who performed the FireEye op. I would image the capability was developed by an expert group in some intelligence agency, and then used as an entry point by a different operator group with lower standards. But who is to day there aren't more of this kinds of attacks out there, just no one has made a foolish error using them yet? If we assume that, we have to assume this operation was somewhere in the middle of a normal curve of complexity, and there are even more sophisticated backdoored systems like that we just don't know about. Imagine any medium-large code base (100+ of KLoCs), that is deployed widely, and has an auto update mechanism. Most companies don't have very strict access to the build process (and even if they do, all you need is to corrupt one employee), so it shouldn't be to hard to patch binaries before they are signed (especially bytecode in .NET and Java) , and add another URL and/or signature for verification (for sig only the attacker needs access to the web site/CDN too). The change will be only a few lines, so is very hard to detect automatically - it will look like regular code for tools.