Hackers Attack Microsoft's Network

Microsoft fell prey to a hacker attack, in which source code to the company's most valuable software may have been stolen, a company spokesperson confirmed on Friday.

Friday's edition of the Wall Street Journal reports that the code for the newest versions of Windows and Office was stolen in the attack. Microsoft's spokesperson could not confirm which code was stolen.

Microsoft and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation--which was contacted by Microsoft on Thursday--are already investigating the hacker theft, which was discovered Wednesday and is believed to have been initiated in St. Petersburg, Russia, the spokesperson says.

The company's security staff discovered that passwords were being sent remotely to an e-mail account in Russia, where the hackers then posed as Microsoft employees working offsite from Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, headquarters, to gain access to sensitive areas within Microsoft's internal network, according to the report.

It is believed that no alterations were made to Microsoft's software codes and that the attack could possibly be one of the first "data hostage" cases, where hackers hold a corporation's intellectual property hostage, threatening to make code public unless their demands are met, the Wall Street Journal says.