Today's Edition
WASHINGTON/LONDON (REUTERS)
A sweeping cyber espionage operation targeting Microsoft server software compromised about 100 different organisations as of the weekend, two of the organisations that helped uncover the campaign said on Monday.
Microsoft on Saturday issued an alert about "active attacks" on self-hosted SharePoint servers, which are widely used by organisations to share documents and collaborate within organisations. SharePoint instances run off of Microsoft servers were unaffected.
Dubbed a "zero-day" because it leverages a previously undisclosed digital weakness, the hacks allow spies to penetrate vulnerable servers and potentially drop a backdoor to secure continuous access to victim organisations.
Vaisha Bernard, the chief hacker at Eye Security, a Netherlands-based cybersecurity firm, which discovered the hacking campaign targeting one of its clients on Friday, said that an internet scan carried out with the Shadowserver Foundation had uncovered nearly 100 victims altogether - and that was before the technique behind the hack was widely known.
"It's unambiguous," Bernard said. "Who knows what other adversaries have done since to place other backdoors."
He declined to identify the affected organisations, saying that the relevant national authorities had been notified.
The Shadowserver Foundation confirmed the 100 figure and said that most of those affected were in the United States and Germany, and that the victims included government organizations.
Another researcher said that, so far, the spying appeared to be the work of a single hacker or set of hackers.
Microsoft said it had "provided security updates and encourages customers to install them," a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
It was not clear who was behind the ongoing hack.
The pool of potential targets remains vast. According to data from Shodan, a search engine that helps to identify internet-linked equipment, over 8,000 servers online could theoretically have already been compromised by hackers.
Those servers include major industrial firms, banks, auditors, healthcare companies, and several US state-level and international government entities.
