That hardly seems out of the norm to be honest. Plenty of companies make comparably trivial mistakes from what I have seen. Plenty of companies accidentally lea

That hardly seems out of the norm to be honest. Plenty of companies make comparably trivial mistakes from what I have seen. Plenty of companies accidentally leave things with their default password. They allow untrusted devices onto their networks. They allow employees unrestricted access to all of their documents on their personal computers. Looking at more specific cases, there was this case where a macOS update allowed anybody to log into root without a password [1]. How about this one where Intel AMT allowed anybody to log in with an empty password [2]. Obviously these are different since these are not internal systems, rather they are systems they shipped to all of their customers that can be trivially compromised, but it is still in the general vicinity of "dumb password" and, in my opinion, is even worse from a security design perspective on Apple and Intel's part. If they would add that to their products, how awful must their internal controls be. In any event, I will concede that my analysis of SolarWinds is an educated guess on my part, but it is hardly relevant to my overall points in any event. Even if SolarWinds is the dumbest most incompetent organization ever it does not detract from my other point which is that even the "best" is abysmal, so even if they were doing the best that is practically achieved in a working environment it still would not result in a meaningful difference. So, the problem is not actually that SolarWinds was chosen, it is that nobody else would be able to solve it either which is a far bigger problem. It means you need to come up with a novel solution to an unsolved problem, not just use something already known. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/macos-high-sierra-hack-root/ https://www.wired.com/story/macos-high-sierra-hack-root/ [2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/the-hijacking-flaw-that-lurked-in-intel-chips-is-worse-than-anyone-thought/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/the-h...