The SolarWinds data breach of 2020 was one of the most widespread and sophisticated hacking campaigns to be conducted against the federal government and private sector.
As early as January 2019, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service breached the computing networks at SolarWinds — a Texas-based network management software company. Since the company’s software, SolarWinds Orion, was widely used in the federal government to monitor network activity and manage network devices on federal systems, the incident allowed the threat actor to breach several federal agencies’ networks.