Microsoft says it has not been able to shake Russian state hackers
Microsoft said on Friday it’s still trying to evict the elite Russian government hackers who broke into the email accounts of senior company executives in November and who it said have been trying to breach customer networks with stolen access data.
The hackers from Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service used data obtained in the intrusion, which it disclosed in mid-January, to compromise some source-code repositories and internal systems, the software giant said in a blog and a regulatory filing.
A company spokesman would not characterise what source code was accessed and what capability the hackers gained to further compromise customer and Microsoft systems. Microsoft said on Friday that the hackers stole “secrets” from email communications between the company and unspecified customers – cryptographic secrets such as passwords, certificates and authentication keys -and that it was reaching out to them “to assist in taking mitigating measures”.
Cloud-computing company Hewlett Packard Enterprise disclosed on January 24 that it, too, was an SVR hacking victim and that it had been informed of the breach – by whom it would not say – two weeks earlier, coinciding with Microsoft’s discovery it had been hacked.
“The threat actor’s ongoing attack is characterised by a sustained, significant commitment of the threat actor’s resources, coordination, and focus,” Microsoft said on Friday, adding that it could be using obtained data “to accumulate a picture of areas to attack and enhance its ability to do so”.
Cybersecurity experts said Microsoft’s admission that the SVR hack had not been contained exposes the perils of the heavy reliance by government and business on the Redmond,
