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[–] 26806525? 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Splain' me what SolarWinds software does.

Thx.

[–] 26808920? ago  (edited ago)

Solarwinds Orion is a network monitoring platform. Basically reports the operational status of all your network devices such as routers, switches and firewalls. Also used as a syslog server which collects status messages from the same devices. It has additional modules for server management, NETFlow and VoIP monitoring and statistics.

First of all if someone had the keys/access to this platform then they would know the entire layout of a corporate network. Second, and worse, if the Orion platform was given read/write access to the network devices through the SNMP protocol (simple network management protocol), they could alter the configuration of any device. For instance one could open up firewalls to permit access to everything from the internet. Or just as easily they could issue a write erase command to the devices and wipe them out completely. That would take a hell of a long time to recover because often times the configuration backups are collected by Orion itself. This would put that business effectively out of business; not at all a pretty scenario. Small businesses would be less likely affected as it would be easier to recover and it's less likely they use SNMP with read/write access.

The biggest hit would be large enterprise networks. Think fortune 500. Can you imagine the fallout if for example Chase Bank had their entire network wiped out? Yipes.

[–] 26815194? ago 

Outstanding.

I'm smarter now.

Thanks.