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Microsoft Executives Hacked

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Full article151 words · extracted from schneier.com · click to collapse

Microsoft is reporting that a Russian intelligence agency—the same one responsible for the SolarWinds hack—accessed the email system of the company’s executives.

Beginning in late November 2023, the threat actor used a password spray attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and gain a foothold, and then used the account’s permissions to access a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior leadership team and employees in our cybersecurity, legal, and other functions, and exfiltrated some emails and attached documents. The investigation indicates they were initially targeting email accounts for information related to Midnight Blizzard itself.

This is nutty. How does a “legacy non-production test tenant account” have access to executive emails? And why no two-factor authentication?

Tags: disclosure, hacking, Microsoft, Russia

Posted on January 29, 2024 at 7:03 AM28 Comments

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Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/01/microsoft-executives-hacked.html