If the past few weeks have made anything clear, it’s that the Internet if full of hacks.
Just days after tech giants Apple and Facebook announced they had been the victims of a sophisticated hacking operation, Microsoft, Pinterest, Tumblr and Twitter said they too had been targeted.
“As reported by Facebook and Apple, Microsoft can confirm that we also recently experienced a similar security intrusion. Consistent with our security response practices, we chose not to make a statement during the initial information gathering process,” Matt Thomlinson, general manager of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Security unit, said in a written statement.
“During our investigation, we found a small number of computers, including some in our Mac business unit, that were infected by malicious software using techniques similar to those documented by other organizations. We have no evidence of customer data being affected and our investigation is ongoing.”
Pinterest, the social networking site, emailed its users on Friday to inform them that their personal information had been leaked.
“We recently learned that the vendor we use to answer support requests and other emails (Zendesk) experienced a security breach,” Pinterest’s warning stated. “We’re sending you this email because we received or answered a message from you using Zendesk. Unfortunately your name, email address and subject line of your message were improperly accessed during their security breach.”
Tumblr and Twitter also use Zendesk for security.
On Thursday, NBC.com announced that its website had been hacked and infected with malware that could harm the computers of users who visited their site, and as news spread of the latest cyber attacks, Facebook said on Friday that a security hacker had identified a hole in the company’s software that allowed developers to access anyone’s personal page and private data.
“We applaud the security researcher who brought this issue to our attention and for responsibly reporting the bug to our White Hat Program. We worked with the team to make sure we understood the full scope of the vulnerability, which allowed us to fix it without any evidence that this bug was exploited in the wild,” a Facebook representative wrote in an email to CNET. “Due to the responsible reporting of this issue to Facebook, we have no evidence that users were impacted by this bug. We have provided a bounty to the researcher to thank them for their contribution to Facebook Security.”
Chinese hackers have been blamed for attacks for a dizzying number of attacks on websites owned by the U.S. Government, the New York Times and the Washington Post in recent weeks.
A 74-page report written by cybersecurity company Mandiant Corp that blamed the Chinese hackers for many of the recent disruptions was itself the victim of an attack this week. Emailed versions of the report were infected with computer viruses that spread when it was opened, Reuters reported.
Many of the companies and websites involved urge users to regularly change their email and site passwords to try and diminish the effects of what has become rather commonplace hacking.