Microsoft has announced an additional measure for keeping its users data safe: it will now notify a user if their account has likely been “targeted or compromised” as part of a “state-sponsored” campaign.
In a new blog post on the Microsoft website, Scott Charney, Corporate Vice President of the company’s Trustworthy Computing division, explained: “We will now notify you if we believe your account has been targeted or compromised by an individual or group working on behalf of a nation state.”
He added: “We’re taking this additional step of specifically letting you know if we have evidence that the attacker may be ‘state-sponsored’ because it is likely that the attack could be more sophisticated or more sustained than attacks from cybercriminals and others.”
The introduction of this policy could have been prompted by fresh allegations that, several years ago, Microsoft failed to notify victims whose Hotmail accounts, the corporation believed, had been hacked into by Chinese authorities. Various other US tech firms, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Twitter, have already brought in the policy of notifying their own users about such attacks.