Hacking thousands of Microsoft accounts around the world ... sparking an electronic war between America and China
According to an informed source, Bloomberg News reported that hackers had infiltrated the accounts of at least 60,000 Microsoft users.
Bloomberg said that the evolving attack on the commercial e-mail programs widely used by Microsoft to a global cybersecurity crisis, as hackers race to infect as many victims as possible before companies can secure their computer systems.
And penetrated a group of "hackers" backed by the Chinese government so far at least 60 thousand victims known in the world, according to a former senior US official familiar with the investigation. It appears that many of them are small or medium-sized companies stuck in a vast network dumped by attackers as Microsoft worked to stop the penetration.
Among the victims identified so far are banks and electricity suppliers, as well as homes of the elderly and an ice cream company, and the rapidly escalating attack has alarmed U.S. national security officials, in part because hackers have managed to infect many victims so quickly. In the final stages of the attack, the researchers say, the hackers appeared to have completed the operation, amassing tens of thousands of new victims around the world in a matter of days.
"This is an active threat that is still evolving, and we are urging network operators to take it seriously," a White House official wrote in an email on Saturday.
It is the second cybersecurity crisis a few months after suspected Russian hackers infiltrated 9 federal agencies and at least 100 companies through tampered updates from SolarWinds, a maker of IT management software, cybersecurity experts who defend the world's computer systems have expressed a feeling Growing frustrated and exhausted.
"Good people get tired," said Charles Carmacall, senior vice president at FireEye, a cybersecurity company based in California.
In response to a question about Microsoft's attribution of the attack to China, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said on Wednesday that the country is "strongly opposed to and combats cyber attacks and cyber theft in all its forms" and noted that blaming a particular country is a "very sensitive political issue."
Both the recent incident and the SolarWinds attack demonstrate the fragility of modern networks and the complexity of state-sponsored hackers to identify vulnerabilities that are difficult to find or even create to conduct espionage. It also involves complex cyber attacks, with the initial blast radius of a large number of computers being narrowed down as the attackers focus on their efforts, which may take weeks or months to resolve.
A White House official pledged a full government response to assess and address the impact of the operation, and said, "It seems that Chinese piracy has penetrated the most famous private and government networks via e-mail program."
