MICROSOFT executives have played down the seriousness of last week’s hacking
incident, saying the intruders only “glimpsed” the source code, or blueprint,
for a future Microsoft product. The software giant has enlisted the help of the
FBI to investigate the break-in.
The security breach came to light last week when security staff at
Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, found that internal computer
passwords were being e-mailed to Russia. “Passwords were being remotely sent to
an e-mail account in St Petersburg,” says a spokeswoman for Microsoft in
Britain. “It’s a deplorable act of industrial espionage.”
Security experts suspect that a virus…
