HPE: ‘No Evidence’ It Has Been ‘Impacted’ By SolarWinds-Based Attack

‘At this point we have no evidence to suggest that HPE has been impacted by this campaign or that any HPE or customer data has been exposed,’ says an HPE spokesperson in an email to CRN. ‘We are treating the issue seriously and taking proactive steps recommended by SolarWinds to mitigate any known risk to HPE or our customers.’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise says that at this point there are no signs indicating that the edge-to-cloud platform provider has been impacted by the ever-widening SolarWinds-based government attack.

“At this point we have no evidence to suggest that HPE has been impacted by this campaign or that any HPE or customer data has been exposed,” said an HPE spokesperson in an email to CRN. “We are treating the issue seriously and taking proactive steps recommended by SolarWinds to mitigate any known risk to HPE or our customers.”

[Related: 10 Things To Know About The SolarWinds Breach And Its U.S. Government Impact]

HPE’s comments come with the ever-widening breach impacting a number of technology companies including Cisco, VMware, Intel and Nvidia.

HPE servers are used by some of the top government agencies and corporations. HPE’s Silicon Root of Trust – which is aimed at preventing compromised firmware code from executing- can be set to check firmware every 24 hours. It is now part and parcel of HPE’s Gen10, Synergy, Apollo, Edgeline and Proliant servers.

Raymond Tuchman, CEO of Experis Technology Group, Potomac, Md.-based HPE partner, said he sees HPE’s security innovation including Silicon Root of Trust as a key differentiator in the server marketplace.

“My question is how often has Silicon Root of Trust prevented a security breach like this?” asked Tuchman, speaking about the SolarWinds-based attack. “To my knowledge none of my customers have been impacted. The question is whether this gets more customers to look at the benefits of buying HPE servers with Silicon Root of Trust. We are going to find out. If it snows you wish you bought a snowblower. If there has been an attack stopped by Silicon Root of Trust you may wish you bought an HPE server.”

More than 40 Microsoft customers were precisely targeted and compromised through trojanized updates to SolarWinds’ Orion network monitoring platform, according to Microsoft President Brad Smith.

Smith said a decisive plurality - 44 percent - of the Microsoft customers compromised through SolarWinds are actually in the IT sector, and include software and security firms as well as IT services and equipment providers. The telemetry comes from Microsoft’s Defender Anti-Virus software, which spots Defender clients who also installed versions of Orion containing malware.

Roughly two dozen computers in a Cisco lab were compromised through malicious updates to SolarWinds’ Orion network monitoring platform, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the incident. The San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant told CRN its security team moved quickly to address the issue, and that there isn’t currently any known impact to Cisco offers or products.

“While Cisco does not use SolarWinds Orion for its enterprise network management or monitoring, we have identified and mitigated affected software in a small number of lab environments and a limited number of employee endpoints,” Cisco said in a statement. “We continue to investigate all aspects of this evolving situation with the highest priority.”