Cyberterrorism: Hack breaches thousands of Microsoft Business accounts worldwide ─Report

*The number of victims of the Chinese hacking group Hafnium’s cyberattack continues to grow rapidly in diverse sectors, as the White House in Washington, D.C. warns companies to take threat ‘very seriously’

Isola Moses | ConsumerConnect

A sophisticated attack on Microsoft Corporation’s widely used business e-mail software is morphing into a global cybersecurity crisis, as hackers race to infect as many victims as possible before companies can secure their computer systems.

The attack, which Microsoft has said started with a Chinese Government-backed hacking group, has so far claimed at least 60,000 known victims globally, according to a former senior US official familiar with the investigation, Bloomberg report stated.

It was gathered that many of the affected victims of the breaches appear to be small or medium-sized businesses caught in a wide net the attackers cast as Microsoft worked to shut down the hack.

Report stated that victims identified so far include banks and electricity providers, senior citizen homes, and an ice cream company, according to Huntress, a Ellicott City, Maryland-based firm monitoring the security of customers, in a blog post Friday, March 5, 2021.

An American cybersecurity company, which preferred not to be named, said its experts alone were working with at least 50 victims while trying to quickly determine what data the hackers may have taken and trying to eject them.

The rapidly escalating attack drew the concern of US national security officials, in part because the hackers were able to hit so many victims so quickly.

Researchers say in the final phases of the attack, the hackers appeared to have automated the process, scooping up tens of thousands of new victims around the world in a matter of days.

Now, the newly discovered flaws in Microsoft Corporation’s software for e-mail have raised concerns at the highest levels of the US Government, which is urging users to immediately apply patches, report noted.

A White House official wrote in an e-mail Saturday that “we are undertaking a whole of government response to assess and address the impact.

“This is an active threat still developing and we urge network operators to take it very seriously.”

The Chinese hacking group, which Microsoft calls Hafnium, appears to have been breaking into private and government computer networks through the company’s popular Exchange e-mail software for a number of months, initially targeting only a small number of victims, according to Steven Adair, Head of the northern Virginia-based Volexity.

The cybersecurity company helped Microsoft to identify the flaws being used by the hackers for which the software giant issued a fix last Tuesday.

Meanwhile, a review of affected systems is required, Carmakal said. And the White House emphasised the same thing, including tweets from the National Security Council urging the growing list of victims to carefully comb through their computers for signs of the attackers.

It is recalled the result is a second cybersecurity crisis coming just months after suspected Russian hackers breached nine Federal agencies and at least 100 companies through tampered updates from IT management software maker SolarWinds LLC. Cybersecurity experts that defend the world’s computer systems expressed a growing sense of frustration and exhaustion.