The adversary inflicted the campaign’s most dramatic harm by silently moving through Microsoft’s identity software products, including those supporting Office 365 and Azure cloud services, and vacuuming up emails and files from dozens of organizations. Sunburst was also a significant moment for cloud computing security. 1 Trey Herr, William Loomis, June Lee, and Stewart Scott, Breaking Trust: Shades of Crisis across an Insecure Software Supply Chain, Atlantic Council, July 27, 2020. The compromise of SolarWinds, part of the wider Sunburst campaign, has had enormous consequences, but, as supply-chain attacks go, it was not unprecedented, as demonstrated by seven other events from the last decade. The story of trust is an old one, but the Sunburst cyber-espionage campaign was a startling reminder of the United States’ collective cyber insecurity and the inadequacy of current US strategy to compete in a dynamic intelligence contest in cyberspace. Both the public and private sectors must work together to ruthlessly prioritize risk, make linchpin systems in the cloud more defensible, and make federal cyber-risk management more self-adaptive. The US government and industry should embrace the idea of “persistent flow” to address this strategic shortfall emphasizing that effective cybersecurity is more about speed, balance, and concentrated action. Overlooking that question of strategy invites crises larger and more frequent than those the United States is battling today.
The Sunburst crisis was a failure of strategy more than it was the product of an information-technology (IT) problem or a mythical adversary.
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