Global cos, govt agencies among 200 victims of suspected Russian hacking

Of the roughly 18,000 SolarWinds customers that received the infected update, more than 1,000 experienced the malicious code ping a so-called second stage "command and control"

At least 200 organizations, including government agencies and companies around the world, have been hacked as part of a suspected Russian cyber-attack that implanted malicious code in a widely used software program, said a cybersecurity firm and three people familiar with ongoing investigations.

The number of actual hacking victims has been one of many unanswered questions surrounding the cyber-attack, which used a backdoor in SolarWinds Corp.’s Orion network management software as a staging ground for further attacks.

As many as 18,000 SolarWinds’ customers received a malicious update that included the backdoor, but the number that was actually hacked -- meaning