Matt Day, writing in Bloomberg »
Amazon paused the rollout after Microsoft discovered a Russia-linked hacker group had gained access to some of its employees’ email accounts. After conducting its own analysis of the software, Amazon asked for changes to guard against unauthorized access and create a more detailed accounting of user activity in the apps, some of which Microsoft also markets as Office 365.
It’s an unusual confluence of events: a massive commercial deal between two Seattle-area cloud-computing rivals, a state-sponsored hack, and an engineering collaboration that could improve the security of the world’s most widely used office productivity software.
“We deep-dived into O365 and all of the controls around it and we held – just as we would any of our service teams within Amazon – we held them to the same bar,” said CJ Moses, Amazon’s chief information security officer.