During that time, email accounts from global leaders of the Uighur and Tibetan communities (two Chinese minorities under heavy surveillance by the government), African and Japanese diplomats, and human rights lawyers were breached.
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Microsoft is following in the footsteps of tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter by announcing it will inform users if their account has been targeted by hackers working on behalf of the government.
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“We’re taking an additional step today”, he wrote. Former Microsoft employees said it was likely the hackers obtained access to the computers of their targets, so the passwords resets would still have been visible to them.
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“We weighed several factors in responding to this incident, including the fact that neither Microsoft nor the United States government were able to identify the source of the attacks, which did not come from any single country”, the company said.
The software firm’s policy announcement comes soon after it was quizzed about why it did not tell victims of a 2011 hacking campaign that it believed China was behind the attack.
Two former employees said that the company’s own expert had already found years ago that Chinese authorities had been behind this campaign, but the company didn’t inform its Hotmail (Now Outlook) users about the hacking campaign.
“The Internet service providers and the email providers have an ethical and a moral responsibility to let the users know that they are being hacked”, said Seyit Tumturk, vice president of the World Uyghur Congress, whose account was among those compromised.
Microsoft will notify its users when it detects a hack carried out by nation states or governments.
However Microsoft is keen to point out that if it does issue a warning like this to a user, it does not necessarily mean that their account has been hijacked by a state-sponsored actor, but it does mean there is evidence to suggest as such.
However this isn’t 100% altruistic on Microsoft’s part.
Charney said: “The evidence we collect in any active investigation may be sensitive, so we do not plan on providing detailed or specific information about the attackers or their methods”.
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If Microsoft users receive an alert forewarning them of state interest in their account, this doesn’t automatically mean their accounts have been hacked.
