One Person Saved The Security of the Internet

The Solarwinds attack showed that threat actors are increasingly moving to software supply chain attacks on software, and compromising low-handing fruit in its delivery. These threat actors often have time, funding and expertise to craft advanced attack tools, and where their attack methods might go undiscovered through software patches and system upgrades.

And, so, somebody (or, more likely, some nation-state/law enforcement agency) tried to backdoor the Internet, and the broadcast media have almost totally missed the story. It’s surprising, too, that many of the cybersecurity dissemination agencies — which basically just echo advice — have stayed quiet. I don’t want to start any rumours, but … [let’s not go there, as “they” might be listening].

Andres Freund

It’s a story of social engineering and one of the best examples of an APT (Advanced Persistent Threat), along with excellent technical skills. And, as they would have said on Scooby Doo, “We would have gotten away with it — if it wasn’t for that pesky developer”. And, that pesky developer is Andres Freund - a 38-year-old software engineer from Microsoft. This main task is to develop PostgreSQL software.

With this, Andres ran some tests on why a software tool was running so slow and found a backdoor within a third-party…