💭 Friday discussion: Cyberwarfare, resilience & legitimate response

The hack of SolarWinds, likely by Russian security services, is brazen, extensive and damaging. It has compromised 18,000 US government systems that will likely leave persistent vulnerabilities. Even Microsoft systems have been compromised.

Image: From the movie Wargames

Bruce Schneier outlines several interesting details about the sloppiness at SolarWinds here.

Microsoft’s Brad Smith calls this attack an “act of recklessness” by the perps:

It’s critical that we step back and assess the significance of these attacks in their full context. This is not “espionage as usual,” even in the digital age. Instead, it represents an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world. In effect, this is not just an attack on specific targets, but on the trust and reliability of the world’s critical infrastructure in order to advance one nation’s intelligence agency.

Erica Borghard and Jaquelyn Schneider argue that this was an act of espionage r…