Microsoft has confirmed that some of its Outlook, Hotmail and MSN email accounts have been hacked, with the contents of some users' emails exposed.
In an email sent to affected users, the technology giant said a "limited" number of accounts had been breached, after a Microsoft support agent's credentials were compromised.
This potentially allowed hackers to access users' account information, including email addresses, folder names, subject lines of emails, and the names of other email addresses they had communicated with.
However, when approached for comment on the incident by Motherboard , Microsoft confirmed that around 6% of those affected may also have had the contents of their emails exposed in the attack.
Microsoft said it was providing additional guidance and support to those users.
"We addressed this scheme, which affected a limited subset of consumer accounts, by disabling the compromised credentials and blocking the perpetrators' access," a spokesman said.
The company has not confirmed the number of accounts, in total, affected by the breach.
However, it noted that the incident occurred between 1 January 2019 and 28 March 2019, meaning that affected users' details were exposed for the best part of three months.
How to protect yourself
Microsoft warned in its email that users might receive more spam and phishing emails as a result of the incident, and urged users not to click on links from email addresses they do not recognise.
The company added that although password information has not been affected, users should change their log-in details "out of caution".
The tech giant said it had also increased detection and monitoring for the affected accounts.
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