We reported recently that Microsoft had been hacked and the company has now said that parts of the code for Bing and Cortana have been compromised by the assailants. This security breach is a huge problem, but with it only being a partial part of the source code, only time will tell how serious the situation is.
The firm spoke out today and said that it has been “actively tracking a large-scale social engineering and extortion campaign”, and they have gone on record to say that the group behind the attack might be the hacker group Lapsus$, a group that has been very active in recent times, with the group conducting attacks on Ubisoft and Samsung, both of which caught the news this year.
The statement from Microsoft details the activity it has noticed from the group, and they have also attempted to warn people and companies about future attacks by suggesting some safeguarding precautions. The company believes the motives are “theft and destruction” or like Alfred in The Dark Knight says, “some people just want to watch the world burn”, never a truer word spoken.
Microsoft’s blog post went on to say that “the group is known for using a pure extortion and destruction model without ransomware payloads. They likely gained access to organizations via purchasing employee credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) approval, using a password stealer, or searching public code for insecure details.”
However, all you customers should not be worried because no customer code or data was involved in the activities, with the group only targeting internal resources. Microsoft has said they will continue to keep an eye on the unusual activities so they can be ready for a similar attack if it comes, and offer additional insight to the investigations when and if they are needed.
