Due to a Microsoft cloud bug, Chinese hackers damaged the US government by stealing email accounts. Chinese hackers breach US government, including US agencies, and aimed at revealing sensitive content.
According to Microsoft, the hacking gang known as Storm-0558 hijacked about 25 email accounts, including those of governmental entities and related consumer accounts belonging to people connected to these organizations. Microsoft uses the moniker “Storm” to identify and track hacker communities that are new, developing, or “in development.” The government organizations targeted by Storm-0558 have not been identified by Microsoft.
Although the exact extent of the theft is still under investigation, Microsoft and US officials have been discreetly working overtime in recent weeks to analyze the impact of the hack, which targeted unclassified email servers, and mitigate the damage.
The State Department was the government department that discovered the Chinese hackers first, a person with knowledge of the situation told CNN. According to the source, Microsoft was notified of the suspicious activities by the State Department. Chinese hackers breach US government, but they only aimed at smaller agencies.
Chinese hackers breach US government after abusing a Microsoft cloud bug
Microsoft, a major player in the technology industry, revealed on Tuesday night that it had uncovered that Chinese hackers had gained access to some of its clients’ email systems in order to gather intelligence.
Within a few weeks of the initial attack, the organization started looking into suspicious activities, despite the fact that the perpetrators were able to modify passwords to access accounts continually.
One federal government agency saw anomalous activity on its Microsoft 365 email cloud environment for the first time last month, and it quickly reported the activity to Microsoft and CISA, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
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In a blog post about the breach that was published on Wednesday, CISA did not name the concerned government agency.
Later on Wednesday, a spokesman for the State Department said that the department had “detected anomalous activity” and “took immediate steps to secure our systems,” implying that it may have been the government that had originally informed Microsoft of the issue. The representative for the State Department stated that the matter “remains under active investigation,” but the department declined to make any other comments.
Chinese hackers were found to have targeted a small number of government agencies and only a few officials’ email accounts at each agency in a hack aimed at individual officials.
A department official stated in a statement released on Wednesday that “Microsoft notified the (Commerce) Department of a compromise to Microsoft’s Office 365 system, and the Department took immediate action to respond.”
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It was unclear right away whether the cyber-espionage campaign was related to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s important trip to China in the middle of June.
Some US officials gave the State Department credit for increasing its cyber-defense capabilities, which enabled the department to spot suspicious activity earlier than it had in the case of more sophisticated breaches.
The number of US businesses, both public and commercial, affected by the hacking campaign is in the “single digits,” a senior US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency officer told reporters on Wednesday.
Featured image credit: Joseph Chan on Unsplash
