Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Appetel, Editor-in-Chief of the

Verge, and Decoder is my new podcast about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm

joined by Joseph Men, author of the book Cult of the Dead Cow, how the

original hacking supergroup might just save the world, and a reporter at

Reuters who focuses on cybersecurity investigations. We talked about a very big

problem. The SolarWinds hack in the state of US cybersecurity. Austin Bay

SolarWinds is at the center of a major US government hack which targeted the

Treasury and Commerce Departments. SolarWinds is a dominant player in network

management software, and if you work at a big company or other large organization

it's likely your network has SolarWinds software on it. And in December it came

out that a group of hackers, likely from the Russian government, had gotten into

SolarWinds and then used that access to breach everything from Microsoft to the

United States government. Hackers were able to access government networks by

slipping malware into a SolarWinds software update. That's all according to the

Global Cybersecurity firm FireI, which was also compromised.

The SolarWinds hack hasn't really gotten the attention it deserves because it

happened during the chaos after the presidential election, but it's a really

big deal. It's also a deeply complicated story, part of a back-and-forth game

of hacking that the United States and its rivals have been escalating for years.

Pay attention to how quickly this conversation with Joseph goes to really big

issues like how deeply our military and security agencies should be

integrated with private company security. There aren't a lot of easy answers

...