> When investigators finally cracked it, they were blown away by the hack’s complexity and extreme premeditation.
"Extreme premeditation?" Please. The old USSR had quite a few spies who stayed active for decades inside America's Top Secret Tent. A century ago, if a navy wanted a new battleship, it could easily be 7 years between "start spending money" and "battleship is completed and ready to use".
It takes a lot of work to build a motorcycle that is roadworthy from scratch. It takes a lot of work to build a skyscraper and develop it into a used space from scratch. Talking about the latter doesn't really discount the former, right?
Vs. from a skim of the article - the entire Solar Winds operation was less than 24 months, from plausibly-first little compromise of an employee's VPN account through detection and fix. That is "Extreme premeditation" about the same way that my hard-boiling eggs for a week's lunches every Monday morning is "Extreme premeditation".
(Vs. if they'd described it as a major effort by an A-list adversary - yeah, that would have been quite reasonable.)