The U.S. government and Microsoft reveal Chinese hackers broke in to online email systems and stole some unclassified data.
Tech giant Microsoft disclosed on Tuesday evening that it discovered a group of Chinese hackers had broken into some of its customers’ email systems to gather intelligence.
The company began investigating unusual activity within a few weeks of the initial attack, though the culprits were able to repeatedly manipulate credentials to access accounts.
According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, one federal government agency first detected unusual activity on its Microsoft 365 email cloud environment last month, and immediately reported the activity to Microsoft and CISA.
CISA did not identify the government agency in question in a blog post published on Wednesday concerning the breach.
The hackers, which Microsoft identified as China-based actors from a group it calls Storm-0558, were able to break in and steal some data from the accounts, according to CISA’s blog post. However, the data that was taken was unclassified, according to CISA.
