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Massive Microsoft breach affects 100 organizations; Google blames China for cyberattacks

Massive Microsoft breach affects 100 organizations; Google blames China for cyberattacks

Time of India22-07-2025
A sweeping cyber espionage operation took aim at Microsoft's SharePoint servers, and compromised about 100 different organizations. That's according to two of the firms that helped uncover the attack. As of Monday, the victims had not been disclosed but most of the entities were in the U.S. and Germany, and included government organizations. It was not clear who was behind the ongoing hack, but Alphabet's Google, which has visibility into wide swaths of internet traffic, said it tied at least some of the hacks to a "China-nexus threat actor."
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Google to invest $6 billion in 1-GW data centre project in Andhra Pradesh
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Microsoft Blames Chinese Hackers for Cyberattack on its SharePoint Software
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Microsoft Blames Chinese Hackers for Cyberattack on its SharePoint Software

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The country also said it supports the role of businesses in creating technical standards in security, industry and ethics. Details about the Chinese body, to be headquartered in Shanghai, are scarce. In brief public remarks before media were ushered out of the room, a Chinese Foreign Ministry senior official, Ma Zhaoxu, said the organization would work to establish standards and governance frameworks. China would discuss details with those countries that are willing to join, he added. As US and Chinese companies race to develop systems that could match or even surpassed human intelligence, safety concerns have also prompted calls for guardrails. AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, who spoke at the Chinese event, expressed support for international bodies to collaborate on safety issues. Part of Beijing's AI strategy appears to come from its diplomatic playbook, which urges support for Global South countries to step up in international affairs. In his address to kick off the Saturday event, Li emphasized helping those nations develop AI. These countries made up most of more than 30 nations that were invited to the high-level governance talks, including Ethiopia, Cuba, Bangladesh, Russia and Pakistan. A handful of European countries including the Netherlands, France and Germany, the EU and several international organizations were also represented. No nameplate for the US was seen by Bloomberg News. The US Embassy in Beijing declined to comment on any official presence. Achmad Adhitya, special adviser to Indonesia's vice president who attended the meeting, told Bloomberg News that China's initiative is 'very appreciated by the Indonesian government.' His country is preparing AI curricula to be rolled out across 400,000 schools and is training 60,000 teachers about the tech, he said. Beijing's emphasis on openness — a word used 15 times in its governance action plan — appears to ride on the success of Deepseek earlier this year. The AI upstart stunned the world not just by releasing AI models that are almost as capable as those of OpenAI but also made them freely available for anyone to download and customize for free. A succession of Chinese companies has done the same, with companies from incumbent giants like Alibaba and newcomers like Moonshot releasing cutting-edge large language models that are similarly open-weight. That accessibility may be especially important to developing countries who may not have the resources to gather vast datasets and train their own AI models from scratch, a process that would involve expensive chips made by companies such as Nvidia Corp. China also emphasizes internet sovereignty, something that may appeal to more autocratic regimes around the world. 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