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Comment by boringg | Hacker News Reader

This solarwinds breach feels like it might spiral into one of the major new stories this year with it’s likely legs. Really depends on how much data was snapped up. It’s like an onion each layer bringing more tears.

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I’m wondering if solarwinds will survive all of this. Must be crazy working there right now.

I used their software, and it’s not the best I’ve used.

I often skip login and reload and it logs me in as a system user. It probably shouldn’t do that.

I have to assume you are joking.

Enterprise "security product" culture is just terrible. These things are sold by slick salesmen and do more harm than good

Why limit it to "security product"?

You can ask anyone who uses Teams at work and they'll say it applies to all enterprise software.

I don't know what the answer is when balancing user acceptance/ease of use and business needs.

Teams in particular recent had a massive security breach where the client could be drive through exploited to own whole orgs and any org connected via guests, right?

I use teams. It works well. Mostly. I like it. Mostly.

Same here. I do understand disliking Teams if you have used the more clunky alternatives, Skype for business for example. Overall though, I find it more useful than before if only because the cultural change it’s leading in my company where more direct communication is now being encouraged instead of Japanese business emails with 10 extra lines of boilerplate and extreme business language tacked on.

Security products are sold for security rather than other useful stuff like messaging, so it's really useless if it's insecure.

um, what?

Honestly wouldn't expect much from government systems that are built by whichever contractor has the best connections and lowest price rather than best code.

Its clients included 425 of the Fortune 500 and the top 10 US telecom companies. https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/15/22176053/solarwinds-hack...

That is a negative, not a positive. The amount of breaches, fraud, etc. that has happened in that category is insane. Would you say the same if it were Equifax?

The point is that the problem is not with how the government chooses vendors. Equifax has nothing to do with it.

I'm still trying to decide if its like the Equifax one and its back to business as usual in months or if they lose credibility entirely. Depends how locked in their customers are.

Since Equifax is one of three credit reporting agencies it's basically invincible. Solarwinds doesn't really have that kind of protection from the US government. Especially not since this has been directly affecting them.

I don’t disagree but what is the government’s alternative here? I just don’t see them being able to quickly pull off such a massive change in vendors if Solarwinds goes under. They’re like the government contract equivalent of “too big to fail”.

Good point. The fact that Equifax is back to business is so disappointing - one would have hoped that the industry would get an overhaul. I agree with another commentator that the market structure is fundamentally different though so it seems, on the surface, that this could sink the ship.

175 jobs open now, let's check in a few months? https://www.solarwinds.jobs/jobs?page=1

>We're Geekbuilt™.

>Developed by network and systems engineers who know what it takes to manage today's dynamic IT environments, SolarWinds has a deep connection to the IT community.

>The result? IT management products that are effective, accessible, and easy to use.

Well yes, very accessible!

Most large companies have some zombie job postings for positions which are no longer budgeted but haven't been removed from the web site yet.

... and even startups who don't yet have the budget but are trying to raise money and create an fake aura of momentum with investors.

Even big orgs in decline have done this.

Is “Chief Security Officer” one of them?

Pretty sure CEO is one of them

Systems can be made more secure, and organisational culture can change.

Don’t fire an engineer because they took unintentionally production down. Learn from it and fix it.

> feels like it might spiral into one of the major new stories this year with it’s likely legs.

many can only hope.

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