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I spent the majority of my IT career working on Cisco Routers and Switches, plus Cisco Voice..

During that time I was contracted to some really large companies, two had worldwide computer networks, where the group I worked on rolled out literally thousands of Routers/switches and IP phones.....

I’m quite familiar with the change control process having written many of them myself.....

Part of my team rolled out Cisco IP Phones for a couple of the major trading companies on the NYSE and on the floor of the exchange, based on all that I’m highly, highly suspicious of a worldwide network going down.....

I’ve seen individual buildings with hundreds of employees go offline, I’ve seen parts of a entire country go offline, but I never saw an entire distributed network with worldwide reach go offline....

[I spent the majority of my IT career working on Cisco Routers and Switches, plus Cisco Voice..]

Good to be discussing this with someone who actually had to deal with this up close and personal. What are your thoughts on how much of this was SolarWinds’s fault and how much was pretty much bad luck to be targeted by a major state actor* - Russia or otherwise?

* There’s a possibly false dichotomy that some have posited between state and non-state actors. It would not be surprising if some non-state actors (i.e. hackers who steal money) were drafted to carry out the work of state actors, especially if they had been found ripping people off outside the country. Extradition to the US is probably a pretty effective threat to coerce compliance.