Imagine a lauded restaurant that attracts government officials and corporate elite. One day, someone sneaks into the kitchen and puts cyanide into a pot of stock used in its signature dish. The sitting U.S. president happens to be a guest that evening and consumes it. Now, the president is dead.

"That's kind of what's happened here, where SolarWinds are the cooks in the kitchen, and somebody has snuck in and put some malicious code into their software as they're building it. And nobody noticed," said Dan Draper, technologist and founder of Australia-based cybersecurity and governance platform CipherStash.