
"present our own evidence"
Your honor, I submit this piece of evidence to the Court : Solarwinds1234.
It's all well and nice to declare the SEC incompetent for cybersecurity, but you need to demonstrate competence for that argument to be valid.
A judge has mostly thrown out a lawsuit brought by America's financial watchdog that accused SolarWinds and its chief infosec officer of misleading investors about its computer security practices and the backdooring of its Orion product. In a Thursday ruling [PDF], US federal district Judge Paul Engelmayer dismissed all of the …
To be fair, that's part of the pre-SUNBURST complaint: it's a flaw in the product which SolarWinds "knew or should have known" (to use the legal term) existed. So it's not something the judge threw out in this case.
However, I'm disappointed in this ruling. Letting SolarWinds off the hook for what was a blatant attempt to sweep a huge problem under the rug is the wrong decision. It encourages similar misbehavior in the future. Armchair judging and all that, but I'm not at all persuaded by Engelmeyer's reasoning (as reported here). I think SW execs most certainly could reasonably have seen right from the initial revelations just how damaging this was going to be.