Chinese Hackers Have Been Reading US Government Emails

Uploaded on 2023-09-20 in INTELLIGENCE-Hot Spots-China, INTELLIGENCE--USA, GOVERNMENT-National, FREE TO VIEW

The US State Department has used a sophisticated alert system to discover an advanced Chinese spying campaign that involved breaches of officials’ emails. The suspected Chinese hackers, who forged Microsoft customer identities to read the emails of State Department employees, also obtained the personal and political emails of a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

This recent Chinese-linked hack of US government emails was first detected in June and may have gone unnoticed for much longer, were it not for an enterprising government IT analyst.

A State Department cyber security expert spearheaded an effort to implant a custom warning mechanism into the agency’s network more than two years ago in anticipation of future hacks, the officials said, shedding new light on how they spotted the breach. The tripwire-like alert went off almost immediately when Chinese spies targeted the agency’s Microsoft email systems in mid-June, enabling the agency to tip off Microsoft and the rest of the US government to the sophisticated spying campaign.

The hack, which Microsoft disclosed in July, still compromised the unclassified emails of top officials at the State and Commerce Departments, including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China.

The disclosure from the State Department underscores both how federal agencies are adapting to beat back increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, and how easily the Chinese hackers might have gotten away with their exploits.

The State Department was the first to report the activity to the US government and to Microsoft. The firm has said the hackers used a powerful digital key they stole via a cascade of internal security mishaps to breach more than two dozen organisations globally, and at least 10 within the US, none of which spotted the intrusion until the State Department did.

This hack attack has caused a lot of criticism about Microsoft from lawmakers, government cyber security officials and the security industry because only customers who had purchased an enhanced security license, known as E5, had access to the type of forensic trail necessary to determine whether a hack had taken place.

Several victims in addition to the Commerce Department have acknowledged they were affected, including personnel at the State Department and US House of Representatives. The intrusion activity began in May and in August the Google-owned cyber security firm Mandiant announced that suspected state-backed Chinese hackers had broken into the networks of hundreds of public and private sector organisations globally, exploiting a vulnerability in a popular email security tool.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman called the US accusation of hacking “disinformation” aimed at diverting attention from US cyber espionage against China. “No matter which agency issued this information, it will never change the fact that the United States is the world’s largest hacker empire conducting the most cyber theft."

Indeed, t is widely acknowledged that US intelligence agencies also use hacking as a critical espionage tool, which is not a violation of international law.

Politico: WashingtonPost: NYT: @DonBacon: Reuters: ABC: Image: GOCMEN

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