SolarWinds Is Bad, but Retreat From Defend Forward Would Be Worse The SolarWinds breach has kicked up a lot of dust. It’s thick, obscuring and deeply concerning. It’s also a long way from settling. But that hasn’t slowed the quick and steady drumbeat of postmortems declaring the shortcomings or outright failures of one aspect or another of the United States’s cybersecurity strategy and posture. To some degree this is understandable. In-crisis autopsies are not unusual in the cybersecurity business, and time is not an affordable luxury amid a massive breach. Some mitigation measures simply can’t wait. And as SolarWinds no doubt demonstrates, real cybersecurity continues to elude the nation.