Search Here

The experts at the Microsoft Corp revealed that the Chinese authorities succeeded into hacking thousands of Hotmail email accounts that specifically targeted international leaders of Uighur and Tibetan minorities. However, the victims were not informed about the hack that allowed the unlawful activity to continue, said the company's former employees. After Reuters requested several times for a comment, the company said that they will alter the policy about informing the email customers when it suspects that there has been a hacking attempt by a government. Frank Shaw, company's spokesman said that they were not sure where the Hotmail attacks originated from, reported Reuters

The company also admitted that they did not inform their Hotmail users through any means that their emails are being snooped into or their data has been collected. The company did not provide additional information regarding the role played by the Hotmail campaign in modifying its policies, The Asian Age reports.

The first signs of an attack came in May 2011, even though the attacks could not be linked to the Chinese authorities immediately. This is when Trend Micro Inc., a security firm, announced that there has been an email that was sent to Taiwan containing a small computer program. This program exploited the flaw of Microsoft's webpages that allowed the attacker to direct copies of all the emails from the Hotmail account of the user to another account controlled by the hacker. According to Trend Micro, there were more than a thousand users who fell victim to this campaign. After Microsoft launched its own investigation of the matter, it was revealed that the interception started in 2009 and the email accounts of Tibetan and Uighur leaders in various countries were compromised in the process, reports Hong Kong Free Press