Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has confirmed that a data breach took place on its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) cloud service. Essentially, company data belonging to customers of Microsoft's hosted business suite were accessed by other users of the hosted software, which affected Microsoft's data centers in the United States, Europe and Asia. The issue was resolved within two hours, though not before "a very small number" of "illegitimate" downloads had occurred.

While the breach appears to be minor in this instance, what is really at stake is the continued confidence of users in Microsoft's hosted service, notably the new version of BPOS called Office 365. Referring to the data breach, Clint Patterson, director of BPOS Communications at Microsoft admitted: "We recently became aware that, due to a configuration issue, Offline Address Book information for Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS)--Standard customers could be inadvertently downloaded by other customers of the service, in a very specific circumstance."

For more on this story:
- check out this article at Computerworld

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