Microsoft has confirmed that some of its email services have been breached
by hackers, with the contents of some user emails exposed by the attack.
The technology giant said a "limited" number of accounts had been affected
by the breach, but confirmed around 6% of those involved may have seen the
content of their emails become accessible to the attackers.
According to an email sent to the majority of affected users and then posted
online, the firm said a Microsoft support agent's credentials were
compromised, potentially allowing unauthorised access to some account
information.
For most this included a person's email address, folder names, subject lines
of emails and the names of other email addresses users communicated with
between January and March this year, but not the content of emails or
attachments.
However, when approached for comment on the incident, Microsoft confirmed
that a small group of users had also been notified that bad actors could
have gained unauthorised access to the wider contents of their emails.
The company said it was providing additional guidance and support to those
users.
"We addressed this scheme, which affected a limited subset of consumer
accounts, by disabling the compromised credentials and blocking the
perpetrators' access," a Microsoft spokesman said of the incident.
Microsoft operates email services including Outlook, MSN and Hotmail.
The company has not confirmed the number of accounts, in total, affected by
the breach.
The firm warned in its email that users might receive more spam and phishing
emails as a result of the incident, and urged users not to click on links
from email addresses they did not recognise
The company added that although password information had not been affected,
it encouraged users to change their log-in details "out of caution".
The tech giant said it had also increased detection and monitoring for the
affected accounts.
The incident follows the discovery in January of more than 770 million email
addresses from a variety of services in an online database allegedly used by
hackers.
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