. Carmakal believes the SolarWinds attacks drive home a key lesson learned in 2020: cooperation in the industry is key. "It's getting people to think about security differently than before," Carmakal says. "It proves the value of intelligence-sharing." SolarWinds headquarters in Austin, Texas.In early December, Carmakal's team first noticed what he calls "suspicious activity on our network.
FireEye had been hacked – and perhaps many others had, too. "When they actually found a backdoor code in SolarWinds, it meant the team had truly found something," Carmakal said. "The level of energy on the team surged." "The amount of infrastructure they'd built to pull this off, and the level of discipline was uncanny," Carmakal says. "This is a group that has been in the game for a very long time."