Forbes August 4, 2025
When Kevin Mandia got the call in 2020 that his cybersecurity company Mandiant (then a division of FireEye) had been breached, the details raised alarms immediately. “It smelled like the SVR to me right out of the gates,” he said, referring to Russia’s foreign intelligence service. “They had a smart way of getting past our two-factor authentication and were targeting us in a way that showed professionalism.” Instead of grabbing everything they could, the intruders selectively searched and minimized what they took – a telltale sign of a cunning foreign intelligence operation.
It was the start of what became SolarWinds cyberattack, which ultimately impacted over 18,000 organizations. But for Mandia, who has been responding to breaches since the 1990s, the...
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