Microsoft has revealed the details of a cyber attack that targeted government agencies and high-profile officials in the United States. The attack was carried out by a group called Storm-0558, which is believed to be associated with China.
The hackers gained access to several email accounts by exploiting a flaw in Microsoft’s cloud platform. They got a critical Microsoft signature key and exploited it to fabricate authentication tokens. They gained illegal access to inboxes as a result of this.
Microsoft is yet to reveal how the hackers accessed the signing key, and the company avoided using the word “zero-day” to describe the scenario as a vulnerability. However, the company claims to have banned any actor behavior associated with the event.
The absence of insight into government departments’ incursions complicates matters even more. Some government accounts had more security logging than others, indicating that incident response should be improved, prompting them to criticize Microsoft’s handling of the matter.
Microsoft said it is still investigating the event.
The sources for this piece include an article in TechCrunch.