A Biden-appointed review board, the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), released a scathing report on Tuesday, asserting that Microsoft could have prevented Chinese hackers from accessing email accounts linked to U.S. government officials.
According to the report, operational and strategic decisions by Microsoft led to the breach of officials’ emails by hackers in China in July. The board outlined Microsoft’s failure to prevent the breach and recommended the tech giant’s future actions, emphasizing that the intrusion was avoidable.
The report described Microsoft’s errors as avoidable and highlighted the company’s failure to detect that an employee’s laptop had been compromised.
Microsoft Chinese (Credits: The Verge)
The board concluded that Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate and called for an important overhaul, considering the company’s extensive global role and consumers’ trust in it.
To address the needed cultural change within Microsoft, the board suggested that the company’s CEO and Board of Directors should directly focus on enhancing the security culture and develop and share a plan with specific timelines for implementing fundamental security-focused reforms across the company and its products.
In response, Microsoft expressed appreciation for the investigation and emphasized the necessity of adopting a new culture of engineering security.
The company pledged to mobilize its engineering teams to identify and mitigate legacy infrastructure, improve processes, and enforce security benchmarks. Additionally, Microsoft stated its commitment to further strengthening its systems against cyberattacks and enhancing detection capabilities.
Microsoft Office (Credits: New York Post)
The July breach involved a Chinese-based cyber actor gaining access to the email accounts of 25 organizations in the public cloud, including federal agencies.
Known as Storm-0558, the hackers focused on espionage and gathering U.S. intelligence. They exploited a consumer signing key obtained after a crash, which was used to forge authentication tokens and access emails.
The hackers breached the emails of 22 organizations and over 500 individuals worldwide, including U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas underscored the review’s importance in addressing the serious cyber threat posed by nation-state actors, emphasizing the critical role of cloud service security in protecting individuals and organizations across the country.
