On Wednesday, Microsoft announced that Chinese hackers had managed to secretly access email accounts belonging to 25 different organizations across the country, including government agencies.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan confirmed in an interview with ABC that the government had detected the breach “fairly rapidly” and took steps to prevent further breaches.
Microsoft said that the hack in question was carried out by the Chinese group Storm-0558, which created fake digital authentication tokens in order to access webmail accounts that operate on Microsoft’s Outlook service. The company addressed the hack further in an official statement on its website: “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.”
Although Microsoft did not specify which groups or agencies were targeted in the attack, it noted that Storm had previously been known to go after targets in Western Europe.
Adam Hodge, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council (NSC) added that the breach had “affected unclassified systems.”
“Officials immediately contacted Microsoft to find the source and vulnerability in their cloud service,” Hodge added.
Chinese officials have not yet spoken out publicly about the hack, but have frequently denied involvement in any such activity in the past.