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Microsoft said Friday that it had been hacked by Russian-linked attackers, affecting a “small portion” of its corporate email accounts.
Russian state-sponsored Midnight Blizzard hackers broke into the personal email accounts of some members of Microsoft's senior leadership team, and some cybersecurity, legal, and other employees were also affected, Microsoft said in a blog post.
When Microsoft learned of the attack on January 12, it said it “immediately began a response process to investigate, stop the malicious activity, mitigate the attack, and deny further access to threat actors.” Ta.
Microsoft says Russian hackers recently broke into some corporate email accounts. (Toby Scott/SOPA Images/Lightrocket/Getty Images)
The company also notified shareholders of this incident in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
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The obvious target of the hackers, also known as Nobelium, was information about this group. Microsoft said it captured some emails and attachments during the incident.
A hacker is sitting behind a monitor in a room. (image/image)
“This attack was not caused by a vulnerability in any Microsoft product or service,” the tech giant said. “At this time, there is no evidence that the attackers have accessed customer environments, production systems, source code, or AI systems.”
Rather, the way they gained access was through a “legacy non-production test tenant account” via a password spray attack, according to Microsoft.
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The company said it would “act immediately to apply current security standards to Microsoft-owned legacy systems and internal business processes, even if the changes may disrupt existing business processes.”
Microsoft said it is cooperating with law enforcement and has notified regulators about the violations.
| ticker | safety | last | change | change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MSFT | Microsoft Corporation | 396.51 | -2.16 | -0.54% |
According to Microsoft's SEC filing, the company “has not yet determined whether this incident is reasonably likely to have a material impact on our financial condition or results of operations.”
“At this time, there is no evidence that the attackers had access to customer environments, production systems, source code, or AI systems,” Microsoft said. (Dado Luvitch/Illustration/File/Reuters Photo)
Just days before Microsoft reported the attack, Allianz Commercial released a report identifying cyber incidents as the “biggest business risk” of 2024.
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According to Allianz, cyber incidents will be the number one threat to businesses in 2023. Other years that ranked highest among the 10 types of risk included 2022 and 2020.
