China-based hackers have breached email accounts at two dozen organizations, including some United States government agencies, in an apparent spying campaign aimed at acquiring sensitive information.
This is according to a statement issued on Tuesday evening by Microsoft and the White House.
The full scope of the hack is being investigated, but US officials and Microsoft have been quietly scrambling in recent weeks to assess the impact of the hack and contain the fallout.
The federal agency where the Chinese hackers were first detected was the State Department, a person familiar with the matter told the media.
The State Department then reported the suspicious activity to Microsoft, the person said.
“Last month, US government safeguards identified an intrusion in Microsoft’s cloud security, which affected unclassified systems,” National Security Council spokesperson Adam Hodge said in a statement to CNN.
Officials immediately contacted Microsoft to find the source and vulnerability in their cloud service,” Hodge said.
“We continue to hold the procurement providers of the US Government to a high security threshold.”
Hodge did not identify who was behind the hack, but Microsoft executives said in a blog post that the hackers were based in China and focused on espionage.
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