Chinese Hackers

[kyonides]

Microsoft’s Contract With Government Agencies
Under Fire Following Chinese Cyber Attacks

After Chinese hackers were able to hack into U.S. government email accounts last week, Microsoft’s security systems are now under fire from Congress.

A cyber gang based in China was accused of stealing emails from senior U.S. officials in a major security breach through a weakness in Microsoft MSFT.O software.

The attacks were allegedly able to access the email accounts of top State Department employees and U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced on July 12.

Federal agencies detected a breach in the two agencies’ accounts “fairly rapidly” and managed to prevent further breaches, White House National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Microsoft said that the breach took advantage of a still-undisclosed security issue with the company’s online email service and not through hacking computers or stealing passwords.

The tech firm accused “Storm-0558,” a Chinese hacking outfit, of forging digital authentication tokens to access email accounts running on the firm’s Outlook service starting in May.

The group has also focused on espionage against governments in Europe and has accessed the cloud-based Outlook email systems of 25 organizations, including multiple government agencies in the EU.

Beijing’s embassy in the U.K. told Reuters that the latest accusations are “disinformation” and called the United States “the world’s biggest hacking empire and global cyber thief.”
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Microsoft acknowledged the hack in a July 11 blog post, admitting that “accountability starts with us” and that it was “continually self-evaluating, learning from incidents,” and improving its cyber defenses.

Members of Congress have been raising concerns for months over government departments’ increasing reliance on Microsoft for cybersecurity tools and services.
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Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) said that Microsoft should offer all its customers full forensic capabilities, saying that “charging people for premium features necessary to not get hacked is like selling a car and then charging extra for seatbelts and airbags.”

Congressional legislators have also complained that the move shuts out other vendors and use of off-the-shelf security software could pose a risk.

Last month, Newsweek reported that several key leaders in the Department of Defense had opposed a decision last year to scrap an existing cybersecurity program that was open to competition.

The Pentagon replaced the program with Microsoft’s in-house security tools, which are typically offered with its business software packages and cost taxpayers $543 million.
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The Maryland congressman also asked whether the deal made the U.S. military dependent on a single IT provider, whose software may be inferior to rivals, while the operational costs rise over time.
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However, smaller competitors have accused Microsoft of squeezing them out of the market through lucrative contracts and creating a monopoly over the cybersecurity sector.

Rival firms warn that the company’s growing lock on the market and the favoritism that it receives from the private and public sectors are putting too many eggs into one basket and endangering security.

Well, MS loves to get involved in mergers and monopolies for sure.