On Oct. 22, 2024, the SEC announced settled administrative actions against four current or formerly public technology companies, finding that the companies all made materially misleading disclosures to investors in their periodic filings concerning the impact of the 2020 SolarWinds breach on their businesses.
A U.S. district court dismissed all the SEC’s securities fraud and false filings claims against SolarWinds and its Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Timothy Brown regarding the adequacy of cyberattack disclosures, finding that the SEC had impermissibly relied on “hindsight and speculation” to find those disclosures fraudulent. The court also dismissed the SEC’s claims that