Why are you presuming that there weren’t warning signs of this being an issue, perhaps detected in July and then decided on the course of action by August with the public details of how bad it was starting to slowly trickle out. I recall reading a precursor news article before the details about SolarWinds coming out and that’s an external source from SolarWinds and the government agencies involved starting to get wind of the damage. It’s entirely possible the FBI was sleeping on the job too, so focused on electoral interference that blinded them to a different avenue of attack if it was indeed the Russians behind it. This indicates our government is wholly incompetent at securing our infrastructure. This is a drum beat warning I’ve heard since the 90s when I was a teenager. Our focus on offense rather than on industry wide defense means our IT culture is wide open to attack. That being said it’s also entirely possible this is broadly true but I have seen no evidence of America making attacks of this nature. Our attacks can be more devastating and technically accomplished, but I’ve seen no evidence of us having the ability and using it of making targeted quick strikes at an enemy’s interior weak spots as a constant source of irritation. We do things like Stuxnet or threatening Russia’s power grid for relatively cheaper attacks. Basically we try to fight a gun war with nukes and we don’t have any guns.

The hack has been active since April [0]. The likelihood of the CEO stepping down because of how severe the issue turned out seems not unlikely vs "CEO is stepping down for no reason. Also we're selling our position".

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/solarwinds-orion-compromise-tren...

They were made aware of their woefully insecure FTP server last year (November 2019). This FTP server had access to (or was used as) the update server for SolarWinds products.

In my opinion, they likely started looking at their security practices at that time.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/16/solarwinds_github_pas...