Chinese spies targeted Microsoft, US commerce secretary's email, other officials: Report

Chinese cyber spies are exploiting a loophole in Microsoft's cloud to hack email accounts at the Commerce and State departments, according to a reports.

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo's account was also hacked, The Washington Post reported.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been probing the incident.

Microsoft and US officials said on Wednesday (July 11) that the hackers have secretly accessed email accounts at around 25 organisations since May.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America" show that the US detected a breach of federal government accounts "fairly rapidly" and managed to prevent further violations.

According to a senior US government official, it would not be fair to compare the espionage to the SolarWinds compromise, which was a sweeping set of digital break-ins that were disclosed in late 2020 and blamed on Russian cyber spies.

As quoted by the news agency Reuters, the official called the recently discovered campaign "much narrower" compared to SolarWinds.

The official said he could not comment on Microsoft's decision to attribute the hack to China.

Microsoft said in a statement that the hacking group - which it dubbed Storm-0558 - forged digital authentication tokens to access webmail accounts running on the firm's Outlook service.

"As with any observed nation-state actor activity, Microsoft has contacted all targeted or compromised organizations directly via their tenant admins and provided them with important information to help them investigate and respond," Microsoft said, without providing details regarding which organisations or governments had been affected.

However, the company added that the hacking group involved primarily targets entities in Western Europe.

National Security Council spokesman Adam Hodges told the Post that the "US government safeguards identified an intrusion in Microsoft's cloud security, which affected unclassified systems".

Hodges said, "Officials immediately contacted Microsoft to find the source and vulnerability in their cloud service. We continue to hold the procurement providers of the US government to a high-security threshold."

The US Commerce Department said it took "immediate action" after Microsoft notified it of a compromise.

China says this is 'disinformation'

Beijing denied involvement in hacking operations regardless of the available evidence or context.

The Chinese embassy in London called the accusation "disinformation" and termed the US government "the world's biggest hacking empire and global cyber thief".

(With inputs from agencies)

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