O Wall Street Journal conducted a survey of several companies operating in the United States to find out if they were affected by the malware contained in the Solarwinds- American company that develops software for managing networks, systems and information technology infrastructure.
The newspaper writes that the network company Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, the accounting firm Deloitte, the company VMware and the router manufacturer Belkin had compromised software installed on a system at their companies. Hospitals and some universities were also affected.
All of the companies mentioned claim that although the software was installed on their systems, they found no evidence that the attack was exploited. What exactly hackers are looking for has yet to be confirmed. Researchers and security experts suspect that they were mainly looking for internal communications, government secrets, executive emails, information on technology development and other vulnerabilities.
Data theft with compromised software is not automatic. The compromised software just created a backdoor cuts on computers and sent a notification to hackers that the computers were infected. The hackers then had to manually exploit the computers in question.
Given that around 18.000 computers are infected, it is likely that hackers have done nothing with the vast majority of computers. According to the researchers, the hackers were Russian and mainly sought information about the United States government.
Last week the computer attack hit the United States Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration, the body responsible for the country's nuclear arsenal. And it came to be one of the largest and most sophisticated computer attacks on the United States government during the past five years.
