Hackers Steal Law Enforcement Documents From Microsoft 53
wiredmikey writes "Microsoft on Friday said that attackers breached the email accounts of a "select number" of employees, and obtained access to documents associated with law enforcement inquiries. According to the company, a number of Microsoft employees were targeted with attacks aiming to compromise both email and social media accounts '..We have learned that there was unauthorized access to certain employee email accounts, and information contained in those accounts could be disclosed,' said Adrienne Hall, General Manager at Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group. 'It appears that documents associated with law enforcement inquiries were stolen,' Hall said. Targeted attacks like this are not uncommon, especially for an organization like Microsoft. What's interesting about this is that the incident was significant enough to disclose, indicating that a fair number of documents could have been exposed, or that the company fears some documents will make their way to the public if released by the attackers—which may be the case if this was a 'hacktivist' attack."
Betting time! (Score:5, Insightful)
(A): Anyone curious about how shocked, shocked, Microsoft actually is about massive electronic eavesdropping by the feds.
(B): Technically sophisticated targets or likely targets of some law enforcement operation looking for information pertaining to their own case.
Any guesses? One of those botnet groups that Microsoft periodically tries to disrupt checking to see if they need to start retaining a lawyer, or coming soon to wikileaks?
Do we know that this is authentic? (Score:4, Insightful)
Has anyone confirmed that the blog post disclosing this incident is actually authentic?
One of the linked-to articles links to another article from the Seattle Times dated January 21, 2014 and entitled "Official Microsoft blog hacked again by Syrian Electronic Army [seattletimes.com]".
So at least one official Microsoft blog was apparently compromised within the past few days. If it happened once, there's the possibility that it could happen again.
I would feel more comfortable trusting the information about this incident if it weren't coming from a Microsoft blog post, too. I think that confirming this information via some other official channel would allow more trust to be placed in its authenticity.
Finally! (Score:4, Insightful)
Documents Deliberately Released? (Score:2, Insightful)
Former Microsoft SDE here. Given universal requirements for strong passwords, security briefings on social engineering, and sensitive document protection technologies employed internally at Microsoft, it seems equally likely to me that there was no actual breach of security. I would venture that these documents were deliberately released or left unguarded for hacktavists to easily find.