American tech giant Microsoft has issued an email alert to its users stating that some hackers have fraudulently got access to its Outlook’s email server last week where data related to support agents’ credentials was compromised. The hack is said to have taken place between January 1st and March 28th this year, but was identified on Friday last week.
Sources who are aware of the situation from Microsoft report that hackers could have got access to info such as email address, folder names, and subject lines of emails. But the content body & attachments of the email would not have been accessed as it is highly encrypted and is stored on different servers after transmit.
As of now, details of the number of impacted people are yet to be known. But Microsoft is urging all Outlook service users to reset their passwords as soon as possible.
As soon as it learned about the hack, Microsoft chose to disable all account logins as a precautionary measure.
The company which is headquartered in San Francisco has specified in its statement that it will assign a data protection officer to victims of all compromised accounts to help them better protect their email accounts in the near future.
Note- Microsoft Outlook acts as a highly customizable information manager to users where they can access features such as calendar, task manager, contact manager, note taking and web browsing along with email application use.
