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.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds | AFP | Getty Images

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.

Technology

Okta shares fall as company declines to give guidance for next fiscal year

Published

1 hour ago

December 2, 2025

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Okta shares fall as company declines to give guidance for next fiscal year

Cheng Xin | Getty Images

Okta on Tuesday topped Wall Street’s third-quarter estimates and issued an upbeat outlook, but shares fell as the company did not provide guidance for fiscal 2027.

Shares of the identity management provider fell more than 3% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

Here’s how the company did versus LSEG estimates:

Earnings per share: 82 cents adjusted vs. 76 cents expected
Revenue: $742 million vs. $730 million expected

Compared to previous third-quarter reports, Okta refrained from offering preliminary guidance for the upcoming fiscal year. Finance chief Brett Tighe cited seasonality in the fourth quarter, and said providing guidance would require “some conservatism.”

Okta released a capability that allows businesses to build AI agents and automate tasks during the third quarter.

CEO Todd McKinnon told CNBC that upside from AI agents haven’t been fully baked into results and could exceed Okta’s core total addressable market over the next five years.

“It’s not in the results yet, but we’re investing, and we’re capitalizing on the opportunity like it will be a big part of the future,” he said in a Tuesday interview.

Revenues increased almost 12% from $665 million in the year-ago period. Net income increased 169% to $43 million, or 24 cents per share, from $16 million, or breakeven, a year ago. Subscription revenues grew 11% to $724 million, ahead of a $715 million estimate.

For the current quarter, the cybersecurity company expects revenues between $748 million and $750 million and adjusted earnings of 84 cents to 85 cents per share. Analysts forecast $738 million in revenues and EPS of 84 cents for the fourth quarter.

Returning performance obligations, or the company’s subscription backlog, rose 17% from a year ago to $4.29 billion and surpassed a $4.17 billion estimate from StreetAccount.

This year has been a blockbuster period for cybersecurity companies, with major acquisition deals from the likes of Palo Alto Networks and Google and a raft of new initial public offerings from the sector.

Okta shares have gained about 4% this year.

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Technology

Marvell to acquire Celestial AI for as much as $5.5 billion

Published

2 hours ago

December 2, 2025

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Marvell to acquire Celestial AI for as much as .5 billion

Marvell Technology Group Ltd. headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on Sept. 6, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Semiconductor company Marvell on Tuesday announced that it will acquire Celestial AI for at least $3.25 billion in cash and stock.

The purchase price could increase to $5.5 billion if Celestial hits revenue milestones, Marvell said.

Marvell shares rose 13% in extended trading Tuesday as the company reported third-quarter earnings that beat expectations and said on the earnings call that it expected data center revenue to rise 25% next year.

The deal is an aggressive move for Marvell to acquire complimentary technology to its semiconductor networking business. The addition of Celestial could enable Marvell to sell more chips and parts to companies that are currently committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure for AI.

Marvell stock is down 18% so far in 2025 even as semiconductor rivals like Broadcom have seen big valuation increases driven by excitement around artificial intelligence.

Celestial is a startup focused on developing optical interconnect hardware, which it calls a “photonic fabric,” to connect high-performance computers. Celestial was reportedly valued at $2.5 billion in March in a funding round, and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan joined the startup’s board in January.

Optical connections are becoming increasingly important because the most advanced AI systems need those parts tie together dozens or hundreds of chips so they can work as one to train and run the biggest large-language models.

Currently, many AI chip connections are done using copper wires, but newer systems are increasingly using optical connections because they can transfer more data faster and enable physically longer cables. Optical connections also cost more.

“This builds on our technology leadership, broadens our addressable market in scale-up connectivity, and accelerates our roadmap to deliver the industry’s most complete connectivity platform for AI and cloud customers,” Marvell CEO Matt Murphy said in a statement.

Marvell said that the first application of Celestial technology would be to connect a system based on “large XPUs,” which are custom AI chips usually made by the companies investing billions in AI infrastructure.

On Tuesday, the company said that it could even integrate Celestial’s optical technology into custom chips, and based on customer traction, the startup’s technology would soon be integrated into custom AI chips and related parts called switches.

Amazon Web Services Vice President Dave Brown said in a statement that Marvell’s acquisition of Celestial will “help further accelerate optical scale-up innovation for next-generation AI deployments.”

The maximum payout for the deal will be triggered if Celestial can record $2 billion in cumulative revenue by the end of fiscal 2029. The deal is expected to close early next year.

In its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, Marvell earnings of 76 cents per share on $2.08 billion in sales, versus LSEG expectations of 73 cents on $2.07 billion in sales. Marvell said that it expects fourth-quarter revenue to be $2.2 billion, slightly higher than LSEG’s forecast of $2.18 billion.

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