Several entities in South Africa have been compromised by hackers who exploited a security vulnerability in Microsoft’s SharePoint servers, according to Eye Security, the cybersecurity company that identified an early wave of attacks last week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hackers breached about 400 government agencies, corporations and other groups around the world, although the number could be a lot higher, the Dutch company said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most of the victims are in the US, followed by Mauritius, Jordan, South Africa and the Netherlands, it added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe never name individual victims, but can share that in South Africa we\u2019ve seen an organization in the car-manufacturing industry, a university, several local-government entities and a federal government entity<\/strong>,\u201d Eye Security co-owner Vaisha Bernard said by text message. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Two more unidentified organizations have also been hit, and details of the attack have been shared with the nation\u2019s Computer Security Incident Response team, he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n South Africa\u2019s National Treasury on Wednesday said it\u2019s seeking help from Microsoft after identifying malware on its network. The bug was detected on its Infrastructure Reporting Model website, according to a statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDespite these events, NT\u2019s systems and websites continue to operate normally without any disruption,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A spokeswoman for the South African Reserve Bank, responding to a Bloomberg question, separately said that there has been no breach of any of the SARB\u2019s systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n SharePoint is popular with South African institutions and companies who use it to store and collaborate on documents, as well as hosting the software on-premises to provide them with control of the systems and an additional layer of security. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft has said that attackers are specifically targeting clients running SharePoint servers from their own on-premise networks, as opposed to being hosted and managed by the tech firm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft did not immediately respond to request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Several entities in South Africa have been compromised by hackers who exploited a security vulnerability in Microsoft’s SharePoint servers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":766075,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[19780,169],"class_list":["post-832830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-it-services","tag-data-breach","tag-microsoft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=832830"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":832833,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832830\/revisions\/832833"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/766075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=832830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=832830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=832830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}