The ex-employees of Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) said that several years ago, they allowed the Chinese authorities to hack around thousand Hotmail email accounts that intended to target international leaders from Uighur and Tibetan minorities in China. The former employees said they allowed the authorities to continue hacking and never told anything about it to the victims. Microsoft received series of requests from Reuters to abstain such practices and hence the tech giant has confirmed that it will intimate its email customers if any attempts of hacking are made from any government in the future.
It is for the first time that such details have come out in the open about the internal hacking and according to the ex-employees of Microsoft, the company officials never emailed or called its Hotmail users that their accounts were probed, and Chinese authorities were collecting all the electronic correspondences. However, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has not divulged what motivated it to expose the Hotmail hacking campaign that took place so many years ago. Although the company could not establish a direct connection with the Chinese authorities for a long time, they traced an email sent to Taiwan containing a small computer program in May 2011.
Thousands of Accounts Hacked
The experts at Trend Micro, a security software company, found out that almost a thousand accounts were hacked in a continuation and when Microsoft started investigating the hacking issue, it discovered that some of the interceptions were also made during July 2009. Most of the victims were the top Tibetan and Uighur leaders residing in multiple countries including African and Japanese diplomats, important people holding sensitive positions in China and human rights lawyers. The two Microsoft employees who revealed this information want their identity to remain a secret. One of the attacks was made by a Chinese network AS4808 and was found be a part of their primary spying campaigns that also included an attack on the security division RSA of EMC Corp in 2011.
