China-based government hackers have exploited a bug in Microsoft Corp’s e-mail server software to target US organizations, the company said on Tuesday.
Microsoft said that a “highly skilled and sophisticated” state-sponsored group operating from China has been trying to steal information from a number of targets in the US, including universities, defense contractors, law firms and infectious-disease researchers.
Microsoft has released security upgrades to fix the vulnerabilities to its Exchange Server software, which is used for work e-mail and calendar services, mostly for larger organizations that have their own in-person e-mail servers, the company said.
Photo: Swayne B. Hall, AP
It does not affect personal e-mail accounts or Microsoft’s cloud-based services, it added.
The hacking group it calls Hafnium was able to trick Exchange servers into allowing it to gain access, Microsoft said.
The hackers then masqueraded as someone who should have access and created a way to control the server remotely so that they could steal data from an organization’s network, it added.
Microsoft said that the group is based in China, but operates from leased virtual private servers in the US, which helps it avoid detection.
The company declined to name any specific targets or say how many organizations were affected.
Reston, Virginia-based cybersecurity company Volexity Government Solutions LLC, which Microsoft credits for helping to detect the intrusions, said that its network security monitoring service began investigating a suspiciously large data transfer in late January.
“They’re just downloading e-mail, literally going to town,” Volexity president Steven Adair said, adding that the targets included defense contractors, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, and international aid and development organizations.
Adair said that he is concerned that the hackers might accelerate their activity in the coming days before organizations are able to install Microsoft’s security upgrades.
“As bad as it is now, I think it’s about to get a lot worse,” he said. “This gives them a limited amount of opportunity to go and exploit something. The patch isn’t going to fix that if they left their backdoor behind.”
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