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Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

Holy this is one hell of a sophisticated attack.

Most of the SolarWinds tools run on Windows only. Some of the obfuscation they use reminds me of how complicated PSD is to parse.

Finding that you've been infected with this malware should trigger a critical response. I wouldn't even feel safe until I've nuked all the servers and rolled as many credentials as I could. And even then who knows how much data the attacker could have already exfiltrated. Frankly this level of sophistication is terrifying because you really never know for sure how deep they managed to get in.

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Sorry for the aside, but I really find it truly mind-blowing that such a major, publicly traded company with products that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to use can be a "Windows exclusive" in the realm of network security/technology infrastructure.

Why is that so mind blowing? Microsoft has a gigantic market share in basically every vertical. There are tons of software companies who make Windows-only products. The world is bigger than (and in fact is largely not) FAANG and startups.

Yeah, I suppose that's true. It just seems like a company that focuses on another company's products seems... unpoetic. Not sure how else to phrase it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> Yeah, I suppose that's true. It just seems like a company that focuses on another company's products seems... unpoetic. Not sure how else to phrase it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The word you're looking for is probably "prosaic".

But that's literally the entire software industry.

A large chunk of people making iPhone apps is basically tied into the feature set given to you by Apple that you leverage to make a product on top of. Same with Android.

> Microsoft has a gigantic market share in basically every vertical

What's a "vertical" in this context? The article uses it as well, but also doesn't explain. This is the first time I've heard the word used this way, and it's a tough one to search for.

Anything related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_market

But here it's actually overspecified. Parent probably wanted to simply say that Microsoft has a gigantic market share in basically every industry sector.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_market

The world outside HN and Silicon Valley is heavily using Windows.

Despite what one might think, Windows is still ruling the desktop and in a typical enterprise environment often also the server landscape.

Almost unimaginable... could it really be the case..?

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.

Basically any company that isn't a software-first company is using Windows. It's clearly not a hard rule, but it's definitely a trend.

Healthcare, Insurance, Automotive/general manufacturing, Professional services, logistics, etc, etc are Windows primary orgs. For many of these companies, internal software development is a relatively recent trend (compared to their company history) so they have IT departments that hold everybody on Windows.

I hear this, but these are mostly static companies that don’t grow and don’t release new products. Microsoft has this problem where they really aren’t part of the future or new ventures.

If you don't think Microsoft are part of the future you're simply delusional. And I say this as someone not fond of Microsoft.

Realize, it doesn't matter. They could have just as easily made their attack run on Linux with nobody the wiser once their infrastructure was compromised and build process on top of that.

Instead there's clearly a large market for them to be comfortable with being Windows only.

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