http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/19/microsoft-outlook-hacked-in-china-new-report-finds/
By Sarah Perez
Techtcrunch
1/19/2015
Only a few weeks after Google’s Gmail service was blocked in China, a new
report from online censorship monitoring organization GreatFire.org
released this morning states that Microsoft’s email system Outlook was
recently subjected to a “man-in-the-middle” attack in China. This is a
form of eavesdropping where the attacker inserts himself in between the
victims’ connections, relaying messages between them while the victims’
continue believe they have a secure, private connection. Meanwhile, the
attacker is able to read all the content they’re sharing.
GreatFire.org was able to verify the attack itself, after receiving
reports of its existence on January 17. It noted that IMAP and SMTP for
Outlook were affected, but the web interfaces for Microsoft’s webmail
services were not. (That is, Outlook.com and Login.live.com were not
affected).
The attack continued for a about a day, and has since stopped, the report
states.
Affected users were shown warning messages in their email clients that
weren’t as immediately worrisome as those web browsers display, which
means that some users may not have been aware that an attack was taking
place. For example, in an example screenshot GreatFire.org posted, an
iPhone warning message says “Cannot Verify Server Identity,” but asks if
the user wants to continue anyway. However, when GreatFire.org reproduced
the same result via the Firefox web browser, the message the browser
offers is far more detailed, saying also that the error could means “that
someone is trying to impersonate the site, and you shouldn’t continue.”
[...]
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