Coming to terms with a hacking and data breach case, Microsoft is reaching bent on some users informing them of an Outlook.com hack that exposed data sent over emails to hackers WHO kept accessing their accounts between January 1 to March 28.
Founded in 1996, Outlook.com may be a web-based suite of webmail, contacts, tasks, and calendaring services developed and offered by Microsoft.
In an email being sent to affected users, Microsoft claims that except the content of the emails as well as attachments, the hackers could have possibly viewed account email addresses, folder names and subject lines of the mails sent and received, The Verge reported on Saturday.
“Our data indicates that account-related information (but not the content of any e-mails) could are viewed, but Microsoft has no indication why that info was viewed or however it may are used,” the report quoted the company as saying in its email.
The case came into notice when the software large discovered that credentials of a support agent were compromised for its internet mail service that LED to unauthorised access into some accounts.
“We addressed this theme, that affected a restricted subset of consumer accounts, by disabling the compromised credentials and block the perpetrators’ access,” the report quoted a Microsoft spokesperson as saying.
Even though the software large ensures that no login details or alternative personal info were stolen by the hackers, the corporate is recommending that affected users reset their passwords.
“Please be assured that Microsoft takes knowledge protection very seriously and has engaged its internal security and privacy teams within the investigation and determination of the difficulty, still as additional hardening of systems and processes to prevent such recurrence,” the e-mail adds.
As of now, it remains undisclosed exactly how many users were affected by the breach.
This security incident comes weeks when a former security researcher pled guilty to hacking into Microsoft and Nintendo servers for a number of weeks in January 2017, allowing European hackers to access pre-release versions of Windows.