[Tycho]

After years of dismantling Solarwinds, a ubiquitous network management software, Thoma Bravo and Silver Lake dumped $286 million of shares in December 2020, the day before the company disclosed a staggering malware breach. The “Sunburst” cyberattack exposed data from California hospitals, the Department of the Treasury, the U.S. nuclear weapons agency, and dozens of other agencies and major companies. While the root cause is still under investigation, multiple lawsuits and reports describe a culture of cost-cutting and frequent security lapses. “Typically Thoma Bravo raises prices and cuts quality, but the affected constituency group—corporate IT managers—don’t have a lot of power or agency,” Stoller writes of this precarious stalemate, with potential geopolitical implications. “Their superiors don’t want to think about a high-cost but low-probability event, especially if every other big institution would be hit as well.”