Microsoft informs Texas agencies they were exposed in Russia-linked hack (NASDAQ:MSFT)

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has told more than a dozen state agencies and public universities in Texas that emails exchanged between them had been accessed by the Russian state-sponsored hacking group Midnight Blizzard, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Bloomberg said, according to the person, the agencies that Microsoft (MSFT) warned include the Texas Department of Transportation, Texas Workforce Commission, Texas Department of Motor Vehicles, Texas General Land Office and the Texas State Securities Board.

As per Bloomberg, Steve Pier – an official with the Texas Department of Information Resources – acknowledged on Friday the exposure of state emails, but said that so far they appear to be only routine administrative communications.

Microsoft (MSFT) did not respond to several requests for comment from Seeking Alpha. The agencies mentioned above also did not respond to multiple requests, except for the Texas Workforce Commission which couldn’t be reached.

Midnight Blizzard was able to get access to the communications between Microsoft (MSFT) and the Texas organizations as part of a wider nation-state attack on the tech giant’s corporate systems disclosed by the company in January.

Microsoft (MSFT) later in March provided another update in which it said it had seen “evidence that Midnight Blizzard” was “using information initially exfiltrated from our corporate email systems to gain, or attempt to gain, unauthorized access.”

“It is apparent that Midnight Blizzard is attempting to use secrets of different types it has found. Some of these secrets were shared between customers and Microsoft in email, and as we discover them in our exfiltrated email, we have been and are reaching out to these customers to assist them in taking mitigating measures,” the company had said at that time.

Bloomberg News earlier this week on Thursday reported that Microsoft (MSFT) had begun informing more customers that the Russian hacking group had seen their emails.

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