The group, which met on Monday, "included private
sector members for the first time" who were invited "based on their
specific insights to this incident," she said.
Hacking groups are using recently discovered flaws in the
Exchange mail server software to break into targets around the world.
The White House group noted that paying to mitigate the hack
"weighs particularly heavily on small businesses," Psaki said.
The breadth of the exploitation has led to urgent warnings
by authorities in the United States and Europe about the weaknesses found in
Exchange.
The White House group "discussed the remaining number
of unpatched systems, malicious exploitation, and ways to partner together on
incident response, including the methodology partners could use for tracking
the incident, going forward," Psaki said.
The security holes in the widely used mail and calendaring
software leave the door open to industrial-scale cyber espionage, allowing
malicious actors to steal emails virtually at will from vulnerable servers or
to move elsewhere in the network. Tens of thousands of organisations have
already been compromised, Reuters reported, and new victims are being made
public daily.
A recent Reuters report revealed that despite multiple
hacks, Microsoft could reap over $150 million in new US cyber-security
spending. This is nearly a quarter of COVID relief funds destined for US
cyber-security defenders, sources told Reuters.
Microsoft previously said it prioritises fixing attacks that
it sees in wide use.
© Reuters
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