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China-Linked Hackers Exploited Microsoft Flaw to Get at U.S. Gov’t Emails

An unnamed federal agency first noticed something was off in June.

A Chinese hacking group exploited a weakness in Microsoft’s software to pry into an unnamed federal agency’s private emails, the White House said Wednesday. According to Politico, the agency first flagged the security breach in June, after the hackers used fake authentication tokens to gain access. “Last month, U.S. government safeguards identified an intrusion in Microsoft’s cloud security, which affected unclassified systems,” a White House National Security Council spokesperson said, according to Politico. “Officials immediately contacted Microsoft to find the source and vulnerability in their cloud service.” Microsoft first publicized the breach on Tuesday, attributing the attack to the China-linked Storm-0558 group. When pressed on the breach in a press conference, the spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs deflected but didn’t refute the attack, saying the U.S. instead was “the world’s biggest hacking empire and global cyber thief.”