Chinese intelligence hacked U.S government emails in ‘significant’ breach

Published

2 years ago

July 12, 2023

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US National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby speaks during the daily briefing in the James S Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on June 5, 2023.

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Over two dozen government agencies in Western Europe and the United States were hacked by a China-based espionage group, according to Microsoft and U.S. national security officials.

“The Senate Intelligence Committee is closely monitoring what appears to be a significant cybersecurity breach by Chinese intelligence,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-VA and chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence said Wednesday. “It’s clear that the PRC is steadily improving its cyber collection capabilities directed against the U.S. and our allies. Close coordination between the U.S. government and the private sector will be critical to countering this threat.”

A spokesperson for Warner confirmed that he had been briefed on the incident.

The hackers accessed Microsoft-powered email accounts at the agencies as part of a continued effort by China-based actors to spy on and steal sensitive government and corporate data. The hacking group, code-named Storm-0558 by Microsoft, also compromised personal accounts “associated” with the agencies, likely employees of the agencies.

The compromise was “mitigated” by Microsoft cybersecurity teams after it was first reported to the company in mid-June 2023, Microsoft said in a pair of blog posts about the incidents. The hackers had been inside government systems since at least May, the company said.

“This was a very advanced technique used by the threat actor against a limited number of high value targets. Each time the technique was used, it increased the chances of the threat actor getting caught,” said Google Cloud’s Mandiant senior vice president and chief technical officer Charles Carmakal. “Kudos to Microsoft for leaning in, figuring this out, remediating, collaborating with partners, and being transparent.”

U.S. government officials identified the potential intrusion to Microsoft. The National Security Council didn’t identify which agencies had been impacted, although a bulletin from the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said that the first report was made by a single executive-branch agency.

“Last month, U.S. government safeguards identified an intrusion in Microsoft’s cloud security, which affected unclassified systems. Officials immediately contacted Microsoft to find the source and vulnerability in their cloud service,” National Security Council spokesperson Adam Hodge said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal. “We continue to hold the procurement providers of the U.S. government to a high security threshold.”

Microsoft is a major government contractor and its Exchange software is used almost ubiquitously by public- and private-sector clients. The company has invested significantly in cybersecurity research and threat containment, given how commonplace its software is and how high-profile its many clients are.

Top law firm Covington and Burling, for example, was compromised by Chinese hackers using an exploit of Microsoft server software in 2020.

The latest compromise comes months after Microsoft and top government officials acknowledged that another Chinese state-backed group was behind espionage efforts that targeted “critical” U.S. civilian and military infrastructure, including a naval base in Guam.

It’s also a timely example of the kind of threat that U.S. national security officials have been warning about for months and years. Jen Easterly, the top U.S. cybersecurity official, has called China an “epoch-defining” threat.

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ChatGPT outage: OpenAI’s chatbot is down for some users

Published

3 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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ChatGPT outage: OpenAI's chatbot is down for some users

OpenAI’s EMEA startups head Laura Modiano spoke at the Sifted Summit on Wednesday, 8 October.

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OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT is down for some users.

The company said it is “currently experiencing issues,” including “increased ChatGPT error rates,” according to an update on OpenAI’s status page.

“We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” the status page said.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Roughly 3,000 people reported issues with the chatbot on Tuesday, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages.

The outage comes days after OpenAI disclosed a security breach at Mixpanel one of OpenAI’s data analytics providers.

The breach compromised user information, such as names, emails and other details tied to the OpenAI API.

OpenAI did not disclose how many users were affected, saying in a blog post that an attacker “exported a dataset containing limited customer identifiable information and analytics information.”

OpenAI kickstarted the AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT three years ago. As of October, OpenAI said more than 800 million people use the chatbot each week.

Beta stock jumps 9% on $1 billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

Published

6 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Beta stock jumps 9% on billion motor deal with air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies strikes $1B electric motor manufacturing deal with Eve Air Mobility

Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.

Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.

Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.

Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.

“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.

Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

Published

7 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster

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Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.

DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.

The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.

SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.

Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.

“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.

The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.

AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.

Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.

WATCH: Amazon rolls out AI-powered tools to help big AWS customers update old software