• How Amazon Web Services may have been used to host malicious infrastructure;
• Why the attackers conducted a "dry run";
• What the true motives were for the attack, which apparently was waged by Russian hackers; and
• How the incident could lead to better cyberthreat and intelligence information sharing.

While these points are all valid to uncover the scope and motive of this attack, they do not help credit unions understand the necessary actions to improve protection. The lesson of this breach is not limited to SolarWinds. For credit unions considering how to respond to the SolarWinds breach, simply dropping SolarWinds as a vendor will not eliminate vulnerability of the systems and vendors that have access to your network. Credit unions need to assess all of their vendors to understand the remote monitoring and management tools installed on their networks, and how they manage security and mitigate risk when using those tools.