Microsoft says compromise of its engineer's account led to Chinese hack of US officials

Source: Reuters

Microsoft says compromise of its engineer's account led to Chinese hack of US officials

Raphael Satter
Updated Wed, September 6, 2023 at 4:47 PM EDT·1 min read

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The recently disclosed Chinese hack of senior officials at the U.S. State and Commerce departments stemmed from the compromise of a Microsoft engineer's corporate account, Microsoft Corp said in a blog post on Wednesday.

Microsoft said the engineer's account had been penetrated by a hacking group it dubs Storm-0558, which is alleged to have stolen hundreds of thousands of emails from top American officials including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Daniel Kritenbrink.

The blog post addressed some unanswered questions around the incident, which drew fresh scrutiny to Microsoft's security and led to calls to investigate the company's practices.

Notably, the post explained how hackers were able to extract a cryptographic key from the engineer's account and use it to access email accounts that it should not have given them access to.

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Read more: https://news.yahoo.com/chinese-hack-us-officials-due-191213771.html