Report: Hackers Behind SolarWinds Attack Gained Access to Microsoft's Internal Systems

The hacker group behind the suspected Russian cyberattack of Texas-based IT company SolarWinds is now suspected of also gaining access to Microsoft’s internal systems.

NPR reports that the group behind the suspected Russian attack of SolarWinds systems that affected multiple U.S. government agencies and private companies was reportedly also able to hack into Microsoft’s internal systems and access some of the company’s source code.

In a blog post on Thursday, Microsoft revealed that while it had previously said that it was among the thousands of companies that detective malware on its systems following an update from SolarWinds, this was the first time that the company announced that hackers had successfully gained access to its systems and viewed source code.

Microsoft stated that it believed at first that it had blocked the intrusion but some “unusual activity” on a “small number” of employee accounts raised alarms at the firm. Upon further investigation, Microsoft found that company source code “in a number of source code repositories” had been accessed by hackers.

Microsoft stated: “The account did not have permissions to modify any code or engineering systems and our investigation further confirmed no changes were made. These accounts were investigated and remediated.”

Dmitri Alperovitch, a cybersecurity expert and chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a Washington-based think tank, commented: “This attack was not as bad as it could have been for Microsoft. If they had modified the source code, or used it to introduce new backdoors, since Microsoft has billions of users out there in pretty much every organization around the planet, that would’ve been a very severe, very grave concern, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.”