US Ambassador To China Hacked
The US ambassador to Beijing, Nicholas Burns, is an American officials whose emails were hacked by a Chinese cyber spying hack.
Also hit was Daniel Kritenbrink, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia. The US admitted the email account of the commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, had also been compromised.
US officials said that these officials were the three most senior targets, but many more could have been breached.
It was not clear how much sensitive US government information had been compromised.
Apparently the Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s email had not been breached, nor had those of his inner circle of advisers. But Kritenbrink accompanied the secretary on the trip to China recently and Burns had also attended meetings with the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, and other senior Chinese officials in the course of the visit.
It is thought possible that the hackers got access to US preparations for the meetings and the internal discussions about them.
US intelligence officials said they were surprised by the sophistication of the cyber-attack, which used a flaw in Microsoft’s cloud computing environment which has since been mended says Microsoft.
Microsoft identified the hackers as the Chinese group Storm-0558, which apparently focuses on espionage hacks.
Recently officials said that hackers based in China hacked accounts of the State and Commerce departments, but they did not say how many people were affected.
The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said that it learned of the hacking campaign in mid-June and that the campaign lasted around a month.
Microsoft has now offered existing customers a series of enhanced digital forensic tools, following frustration from US officials that the high price tag it placed on core security products had prevented many lower-paying victims from detecting the breach.
Reuters: The Wall Street Journal: The Guardian: Independent: NBC News: US Dept. Of State: Politico
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