A US Senate official said Chinese hackers who disrupted Microsoft’s email platform earlier this year succeeded in stealing tens of thousands of emails from the country’s State Department accounts. Reuters reported.
He attended a briefing with State Department officials who told lawmakers that 60,000 emails were stolen from 10 different State Department accounts, he said. The names of the victims were not disclosed, but all but one were active in East Asia and the Pacific, he cited. Reuters. The employee works for U.S. Sen. Eric Schmidt.
Allegations that China hacked the State Department, along with more than 20 other organizations, most of which are still unidentified, have strained already tense U.S.-China relations. The Chinese government has denied any involvement in espionage.
The hack has also brought attention back to Microsoft’s significant role in providing IT services to the U.S. government.
“We need to strengthen our defenses against these types of cyberattacks and intrusions in the future,” Schmidt said in a statement shared by staff in an email to Reuters after the meeting.
“The federal government’s reliance on a single vendor needs to be critically examined as a potential weakness,” he said.
The U.S. State Department did not immediately return a message seeking comment. Mr. Schmidt’s office did not immediately respond to a request for an interview with him.
Earlier this month, Microsoft said in a blog post that China’s hacking of senior officials at the U.S. Departments of State and Commerce stemmed from a compromise of the corporate accounts of Microsoft engineers. The company said the engineer’s account was compromised by a group of hackers they dubbed Storm-0558, and that hundreds of thousands of emails were sent to him from senior U.S. government officials, including Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, and Assistant U.S. Secretary of State. It was announced that the vehicle was allegedly stolen. Mr. Daniel Kritenbrink, National Representative for East Asia;
On June 5, Microsoft’s 365 software suite, which includes Teams and Outlook, went down for more than two hours for more than thousands of users, and then briefly came back the next morning. The attacks continued throughout this week, and Microsoft acknowledged on June 9 that its Azure cloud computing platform was affected. Then, late on June 8, computer security news site BleepingComputer.com reported that his cloud-based OneDrive file hosting was temporarily down worldwide. The company said in June that an outage that affected some of its services over several days earlier this month was the result of a cyberattack, but there was no evidence that customer data had been accessed or compromised. said.
(Information provided by Reuters)
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