Microsoft Breach by Syrian Hackers

Netiquette has, at its core, the basis for maintaining safe information to senders, recipients and hosts. This article is frightening. It really shows the need for constant vigilance. If a small country like Syria is able to crack one of our largest technology companies, arguably there is much more to do for added security. The following article, via Netiquette IQ, is offered to assist Netiquette IQ readers in raising the alarm about their respective infrastructure environment.

Syrian Hackers Breached Microsoft’s Corporate Email

January 15, 2014, 4:14 PM PST  By Arik Hesseldahl

A band of hackers claiming to be working in support of the embattled government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad attacked and gained access to corporate email accounts belonging to employees of software giant Microsoft.

The attack comes days after the same group, the Syrian Electronic Army, claimed responsibility for a series of attacks against a Microsoft blog and the company’s Twitter account.

Microsoft confirmed the breach in a statement: “A social engineering cyberattack method known as phishing resulted in a small number of Microsoft employee social media and email accounts being impacted. These accounts were reset and no customer information was compromised. We continue to take a number of actions to protect our employees and accounts against this industry-wide issue.”

As with prior security incidents attributed to the SEA, the attack was carried out via phishing, a technique where a legitimate-seeming email attachment containing malware is sent to an employee of a targeted company or organization. Opening the attachment executes the malware, which gives an attacker remote access to a system or compromises an account.

In claiming responsibility, the group posted to Twitter a partial screenshot of the contents of at least one internal email between Microsoft employees.

The Syrian Electronic Army claimed credit for a series of attacks against Microsoft sites and one of its Twitter accounts four days ago. Today it said its attacks against the company are ongoing.

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