Dominion is trying to hide their relationship with SolarWinds.
We reported yesterday that late Sunday night the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a rare Emergency Directive 21-01, in response to a KNOWN COMPROMISE involving SolarWinds Orion products.
It turns out that Dominion was trying to hide the fact that they were connected with SolarWinds:
Dominion deleted the reference and link to "SolarWinds" from their website, but we have the archive still.
Now you see it... now you dont.https://t.co/oSdLXpWSJPhttps://t.co/JDWWFVfofr pic.twitter.com/NpuWdlS238
— Ron (@CodeMonkeyZ) December 15, 2020
One reader shared with us some thoughts about SolarWinds technology:
I work in IT and I am now left wondering if Solar Winds was used as a backdoor "jump host" to get into Dominion machines. If the machines each had a unique hostname and they were being connected to a central network it is a rational way to explain it. A "jumphost" is a server (which is very bad security practice, by the way) that contains all the hosts on a network with their hostnames and ip addresses so you can just "jump" to them or remote to them. If they did indeed put a backdoor in Solar Winds and connected these to a network, this is how they would do it: Solar Winds might be hacked to be a jumphost. I cannot say this is true for sure, but it is worth digging into. A "jumphost" is bad because it puts all your hosts and devices into one basket and if a hacker gets in there, you can only imagine what a nightmare they can create.
Another IT professional shared this:
I am also an IT professional that uses SolarWinds. We use SolarWinds to manage network equipment, servers, etc. SolarWinds is a very powerful tool. SolarWinds has a scripting tool capable of automated task scheduling for configuration management. So say you had 1000 or more voting machines spread across the country. You could build scripts to download data from or upload data to rapidly in seconds. SolarWinds services and accounts are granted elevated permissions on equipment to perform these tasks. Hackers could take over a company's SolarWinds management server to use as a "zombie" and orchestrate attacks on voting machines from all over making it difficult to track.