CBS News How U.S. cyber policy changed after SolarWinds The Biden Administration imposed sanctions on Russia, ordered new cybersecurity standards for federal contracts with software companies, and chose the nation's first National Cyber Director. 2021 Jul 04 In March of last year, thousands of companies and U.S. government agencies were sent a routine software update. This happened regularly with SolarWinds Orion software. There was no reason to suspect anything was wrong with the update. What they couldn't see at the time was a malicious piece of code buried deep within the update, a Trojan horse planted by Russian military hackers looking for a backdoor to important American computer networks.