China has called the US government ‘the world’s largest hacking empire’. It's in response to a Microsoft report accusing Chinese state-sponsored hackers of snooping on US government emails.
In a blog post published on Tuesday, Microsoft said the hacker group dubbed ‘Storm-0558’ gained access to email accounts linked to 25 organisations, including western European government agencies and at least two US government agencies.‘We assess this adversary is focused on espionage, such as gaining access to email systems for intelligence collection,’ said Microsoft’s executive vice president of security Charlie Bell, in a separate post.
The email accounts of US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and Department of State officials were also hacked, according to reports from The Washington Post, citing US officials familiar with the matter. Microsoft said in a statement that the hacking group forged digital authentication tokens to access webmail accounts running on the firm’s Outlook service starting in May.
‘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,’ said the company.The breach was detected weeks later when customers complained to Microsoft about abnormal email activity
‘No matter which agency issued this information, it will never change the fact that the United States is the world’s largest hacker empire conducting the most cyber theft,’ said Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin in a routine briefing.
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