Microsoftthe well-known technology giant behind Windows, Bing and Outlook announced that its security team detected an attack against it on January 12, 2024 by a group of cyber attackers allegedly sponsored by Russia called Midnight Blizzard or Nobelium.

If we check the data provided by the company, we come to the conclusion that This is the same Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) that was behind the 2020 cyber attack against SolarWinds, which ended up influencing corporations alongside companies like Cisco, Intel VMware, NVIDIA, and Microsoft because they were clients. In addition, the Redmond giant admitted that through the compromised SolarWinds software, the attackers even got access to the source code it stores.

Going back to the latest attack Microsoft received, the company explained the following via its official blog: “Starting in late November 2023, a threat actor used a password spraying attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and gained a foothold, then used account permissions accessed a very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of our senior management team and employees in our legal, cybersecurity and other functions, and leaked some emails and attached documents.”

“The investigation shows that they initially targeted email accounts for information related to Midnight Blizzard.” “We are in the process of notifying the staff whose email was used.”

Microsoft explains that it has yet to find any evidence that the vulnerability was exploited or that Midnight Blizzard accessed customer environments, production systems, source code, or artificial intelligence systems. However, he has confirmed access to company email accounts including some of the management and employees from areas such as legal, cyber security and others. When we see what the cyber attack covered, everything indicates that the goal was to obtain important company data.

The cyberattack would come just days after Microsoft announced the Secure Future Initiative (SFI), an initiative that aims to improve its own cybersecurity with advanced protections that are based on three pillars: a focus on artificial intelligence-based cyber defenses; , advances in basic software engineering, and support for stricter application of international standards to protect civilians from cyber threats.

The Redmond giant acknowledged that “this incident has highlighted the urgent need to act even faster. We will act immediately to apply our current security standards to legacy systems and internal business processes owned by Microsoft, even if these changes may disrupt existing business processes.. “It will likely cause some level of disruption as we adjust to this new reality, but it is a necessary step and only the first of several we will take to embrace this philosophy.”

In the coming days or weeks, we may learn more about this new cyberattack that Microsoft has received, which may end up leading to a new political clash between the United States and Russia, if the origin mentioned by the company is confirmed.