US being hit by huge cyber attacks, Microsoft warns

Hundreds of companies and organisations are being hit by a wave of cyber attacks, Microsoft has warned.

The hacking appears to be being perpetrated by the same group as led last year’s massive SolarWinds cyber attack, it said.

This time around, the attacks were looking to target “resellers and other technology service providers” of cloud services, Microsoft wrote in a new blog post.

It has notified 609 different companies that they have been targeted by the attacks over the summer, the company said. Only a small number of those had actually been successful.

US officials confirmed to the New York Times that the operation was underway, with one unnamed senior administration official calling it “unsophisticated, run-of-the mill operations that could have been prevented if the cloud service providers had implemented baseline cybersecurity practices.”

“This recent activity is another indicator that Russia is trying to gain long-term, systematic access to a variety of points in the technology supply chain and establish a mechanism for surveilling – now or in the future – targets of interest to the Russian government,” Microsoft wrote.

Additional reporting by Reuters