Tens of thousands of emails were stolen from U.S. State Department accounts by Chinese hackers in May after they broke into Microsoft’s cloud-based Exchange email system.
U.S. State Department officials said that the attackers acquired at least 60,000 emails from Outlook accounts belonging to State Department employees stationed in East Asia, the Pacific, and Europe during a recent Senate staff briefing, as first reported by Reuters.
The hackers also succeeded in getting a list of every email address used by the department. The compromised State Department staff spent much of their time working on Indo-Pacific diplomatic initiatives.
In a statement, Senator Eric Schmitt stated, “We need to harden our defenses against these kinds of cyberattacks and intrusions in the future read more Microsoft breach led to the theft of 60k US State Dept emails.
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