Microsoft’s 40 Customers Hacked by Government Agencies

Brad Smith, Microsoft President, has called on the ever-growing hacking campaign into a U.S. tech firm this week. 

In a Thursday’s blog post, he wrote “This is not ‘espionage as usual,’ even in the digital age. Instead, it represents an act of recklessness that created a serious technological vulnerability for the United States and the world.“ 

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He said that 40 of Microsoft’s customers were hit by the breach. He stated the reason behind this the SolarWinds software targeted by suspected Russian hackers.  

In the U.S., there were more than 80% of customers and the rest were from Canada, Belgium, Mexico, the U.K., Spain, Israel, and the UAE.  

Smith said that he is expecting the number of victims to grow. 

He wrote, “In effect, this is not just an attack on specific targets, but on the trust and reliability of the world’s critical infrastructure in order to advance one nation’s intelligence agency.”  

Till now, as many as six federal agencies are known to have been hit. On Thursday, Politico wrote that the hack into the IT company is suspected to be from Russia. They still don’t know the exact scope of the breach. 

IT management services, SolarWinds provided services to at least 17,000 customers including the U.S. government and private firms. The attack is believed to have started in March and it went undetected since then. 

In his post, Smith stressed the broader implications of the breach: “The attack, unfortunately, represents a broad and successful espionage-based assault on both the confidential information of the U.S. Government and the tech tools used by firms to protect them.“ 

Smith elaborated the attack highlights how desperately the U.S. government and the private tech sector are. They also shared insights about the global community. He says that they must join forces to respond to cyberattacks in an organized fashion.