China-based hackers have breached email accounts at more than two dozen organizations, including some US government agencies, in an apparent spying campaign aimed at obtaining sensitive information, according to data from Microsoft and the White House late Tuesday.
The White House has now confirmed that it “rapidly” detected the breach of US government accounts and prevented further breaches.
The full scope of the breach is being investigated, but US officials and Microsoft have been working secretly in recent weeks to assess the impact of the breach and contain its fallout, according to CNN.
A person familiar with the matter told CNN that the federal agency where the Chinese hackers were first detected was the State Department. The State Department then reported the suspicious activity to Microsoft, the person said.
“Last month, US government safeguards identified a breach in Microsoft’s ‘cloud’ that affected unclassified systems,” National Security Council spokesman Adam Hodge said in a statement to CNN.
“The officials immediately contacted Microsoft to find the source and vulnerabilities in their cloud service,” Hodge said.
Hodge did not specify who was behind the hack, but Microsoft executives said in a blog post that the hackers were in China and focused on espionage.
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