REDMOND, WA (MyBellinghamNow.com) – A Biden administration-appointed review board has issued a scathing indictment of Microsoft corporate security and transparency.

The panel said in Tuesday’s report that “a cascade of errors” by the tech giant let state-backed Chinese cyber operators break into email accounts last year of senior U.S. officials including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

The Cyber Safety Review Board describes what it said is shoddy cybersecurity, a lax corporate culture and a lack of sincerity about the company’s knowledge of the targeted breach, which affected multiple U.S. agencies that deal with China.

The panel made sweeping recommendations, including urging Microsoft to put on hold adding features to its cloud computing environment until “substantial security improvements have been made.”

Microsoft said it appreciated the board’s investigation. It added that recent events “have demonstrated a need to adopt a new culture of engineering security in our own network.”

In all, the state-backed Chinese hackers broke into the Microsoft Exchange Online email of 22 organizations and more than 500 individuals around the world including the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, accessing some cloud-based email boxes for at least six weeks and downloading some 60,000 emails from the State Department alone.