Microsoft said it identified more than 40 of its customers that installed trojanized versions of the SolarWinds Orion platform and where hackers escalated intrusions with additional, second-stage payloads.
The OS maker said it was able to discover these intrusions using data collected by Microsoft Defender antivirus product, a free antivirus product built into all Windows installations.
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Microsoft President Brad Smith said his company is now in the process of notifying all the impacted organizations, 80% of which are located in the United States, with the rest being spread across seven other countries — namely Canada, Mexico, Belgium, Spain, the UK, Israel, and the UAE.
While the current list of known victims of the SolarWinds hack mostly includes US government agencies, Smith said the government sector is only a small portion of the victim list, with 44% being IT companies, such as software firms and equipment providers…
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