Reuters: Hackers have stolen tens of thousands of US government emails

Tens of thousands of emails from the US State Department were stolen in the hack of Microsoft’s cloud service that came to light earlier this year. The Reuters news agency wrote this on Thursday based on internal sources.

Reuters has said he spoke to a staff member of the United States Senate, who works for Senator Eric Schmitt. The staffer, who claims he attended a briefing by ministry IT officials, says 60,000 emails were stolen from ten accounts.

Nine of those accounts are from civil servants working in East Asia and one of them works in Europe. They are primarily engaged in diplomatic efforts in those regions, the staffer said. The state hackers, who are said to be affiliated with China, have also obtained a list of all the ministry’s emails. Microsoft has not yet responded to the claims.

The attack, which Microsoft says was carried out by the hacker group Storm-0558, could be carried out using a signing key from Microsoft software. This allowed them to penetrate 25 organizations, including companies and governments.