Lessons from the SolarWinds Breach: A Discussion With CISO Tim Brown

At JFrog’s swampUP 2026 conference, former SolarWinds CISO Tim Brown discussed the 2020 Sunburst breach, which involved malicious code inserted into product builds rather than source code and ultimately affected software downloaded by roughly 18,000 customers. He described the crisis response, including legal counsel, external investigators, broad public communication, and the operational and personal pressures of managing a globally significant supply chain incident. Brown also recounted the SEC’s later action against both him and SolarWinds, its eventual dismissal with prejudice, and the resulting concerns about personal liability and organizational support for CISOs. SolarWinds rebuilt customer trust by redesigning its build environment around assumed breach, externalized and code-defined systems, segmented access, and multiple independent build stages. Looking ahead, Brown and JFrog CISO Paul Davis emphasized that AI agents and non-human identities create new security challenges requiring guardrails, sandboxing, automated testing, stronger software security controls, and close cooperation among developers, DevOps teams, security leaders, and executives.

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