News of the Cyber World

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Microsoft says SolarWinds hackers accessed company source code

Microsoft said Thursday that the SolarWinds hackers were able to access company source code, although the technology giant described the incident as largely harmless in an update to an internal investigation.
The initial reports that Microsoft suffered a breach via updates to the SolarWinds Orion software generated some partial denials, but the investigation update helps illuminate what happened, and what didn’t, in an apparent cyber-espionage operation that also hit the federal government and other major companies.
Microsoft has dubbed the SolarWinds cyberattack Solorigate, something cybersecurity firm FireEye has called Sunburst.

We detected unusual activity with a small number of internal accounts and upon review, we discovered one account had been used to view source code in a number of source code repositories.
The account did not have permissions to modify any code or engineering systems and our investigation further confirmed no changes were made. These accounts were investigated and remediated.
[We] found no evidence of access to production services or customer data. The investigation, which is ongoing, has also found no indications that our systems were used to attack others.

So far Microsoft strongly believes that reading their source code stored in their several repositories is no real harm to their systems and products. They might be probably right... for the time being. We can't assure you nothing might happen next that could force them to change their viewpoint abruptly. You see, hackers aren't used to think like your average programmer, especially if we're talking about Advanced Persistent Threats APTs like those working for China or North Korea.