China-based government hackers have exploited a bug in Microsoft Corp’s e-mail server software to target US organizations, the company said on Tuesday.
Microsoft said that a “highly skilled and sophisticated” state-sponsored group operating from China has been trying to steal information from a number of targets in the US, including universities, defense contractors, law firms and infectious-disease researchers.
Microsoft has released security upgrades to fix the vulnerabilities to its Exchange Server software, which is used for work e-mail and calendar services, mostly for larger organizations that have their own in-person e-mail servers, the company said.
Photo: Swayne B. Hall, AP
It does not affect personal e-mail accounts or Microsoft’s cloud-based services, it added.
The hacking group it calls Hafnium was able to trick Exchange servers into allowing it to gain access, Microsoft said.
The hackers then masqueraded as someone who should have access and created a way to control the server remotely so that they could steal data from an organization’s network, it added.
Microsoft said that the group is based in China, but operates from leased virtual private servers in the US, which helps it avoid detection.
The company declined to name any specific targets or say how many organizations were affected.
Reston, Virginia-based cybersecurity company Volexity Government Solutions LLC, which Microsoft credits for helping to detect the intrusions, said that its network security monitoring service began investigating a suspiciously large data transfer in late January.
“They’re just downloading e-mail, literally going to town,” Volexity president Steven Adair said, adding that the targets included defense contractors, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, and international aid and development organizations.
Adair said that he is concerned that the hackers might accelerate their activity in the coming days before organizations are able to install Microsoft’s security upgrades.
“As bad as it is now, I think it’s about to get a lot worse,” he said. “This gives them a limited amount of opportunity to go and exploit something. The patch isn’t going to fix that if they left their backdoor behind.”
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS