The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has dropped remaining litigation against software vendor SolarWinds regarding the infamous hack that affected the likes of Nvidia, Cisco, Ciena, and countless more.

Three years after the 2020 mega-attack, the SEC brought charges against the firm and CISO Tim Brown, accusing them of making materially false and misleading statements about the company's security in the two years that preceded the maelstrom.

Those claims were mostly dismissed last year by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, after which it was reported SolarWinds and the SEC were due to ink a settlement agreement.

Thursday saw the SEC dismiss its entire case, stating “the Commission’s decision to seek dismissal is ‘in the exercise of its discretion’ and ‘does not necessarily reflect the Commission’s position on any other case.’”

In a vindicatory blog titled ‘Forged in Fire, Focused on the Future,’ CEO and president Sudhakar Ramakrishna wrote the end of the SEC saga marked “the end of a transformative chapter for SolarWinds and the beginning of our next.”

“We close an era that challenged our company, our team, and our principles. We emerge stronger, more secure, and better prepared than ever for what lies ahead,” Ramakrishna said. “We refused to be defined by what happened to us … We chose to confront the attack with radical transparency, urgency, collaboration, humility, and a strong commitment to doing the right thing for our customers and the broader community.

“We said from the beginning – and demonstrated during the litigation – the claims were unfounded, and we are happy the SEC has finally decided to abandon them. We stood firmly with our CISO … and this decision affirms our belief that our team acted with integrity throughout.”

The CEO ended the post by saying SolarWinds was focused on a future defined by “the possibilities and potential of artificial intelligence.”

Ironically, the SolarWinds attack may be remembered as the biggest cybersecurity attack in the pre-AI era.

In the current AI-dominant era, Google has found evidence of nation-state-backed actors experimenting with large language models (LLMs) for reconnaissance automation and attack scripting, as well as identifying what it claimed to be the first observed live malware using an LLM to produce operational commands in real time, targeting network structures.

Therefore, as AI develops, so does the cybersecurity threat for enterprises, potentially dwarfing what occurred during the SolarWinds escapade.

A 2020 investigation by the Wall Street Journal found that Cisco, Intel, Nvidia, and VMware were among the two dozen businesses it could prove had installed the malicious updates that let Russia-affiliated hackers in.

The attack made use of the Sunburst malware, which compromised the data and systems of a select number of high-value targets for intelligence gathering purposes as opposed to financial gains.

This was achieved after spreading to approximately 18,000 organizations globally through compromised SolarWinds software updates, in which the malware mimicked legitimate network traffic and remained dormant for a period after installation, effectively circumventing threat detection techniques.