Chinese hackers hack the email account of the US ambassador to China. Who is behind it?
The WSJ reports that "Beijing-linked" hackers gained access to the email account of US Ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, in an attack that allegedly "compromised at least hundreds of thousands of individual US government emails."
Daniel Kritenbrink , Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, was also hacked in the cyberespionage attack. While it hasn't been confirmed, the two diplomats are believed to be the two most senior State Department officials targeted in the alleged spy campaign revealed last week.
Unlike previous "Russian hacking" campaigns, which dominated the news between 2016 and 2022, for which there is some suspicion that it was instead some internal federal agency, it is not clear who or what is behind this "Chinese" campaign.
According to the Journal, although the infiltration was limited to unclassified emails, "the mailboxes of Burns and Kritenbrink may have allowed the hackers to gather information about US planning for a recent series of visits to China by senior Biden administration officials, as well as internal conversations about US policies toward the rival in a period of delicate diplomacy that has been repeatedly called into question in recent months."
Burns and Kritenbrink are the second and third top Biden administration officials to be identified in the press as victims of hacking. US Secretary Gina Raimondo's email was also compromised in the breach, US officials said, who also said the email of senior US state official Antony Blinken was not directly infiltrated in the hack, nor were those of his circle of high-level advisers. Instead, the hackers appear to have focused on a small number of senior officials responsible for managing US-China relations . That said, given that this appears to be another Deep State narrative, one set to change over time as Deep State needs change, the WSJ was quick to point out that “the estimate of individual emails accessed is rough and could even grow, people said.”
"For security reasons, we will not be sharing additional information about the nature and scope of this cybersecurity incident at this time," a State Department spokesperson said. “The Department continuously monitors and responds to activity of concern on our networks. Our investigations are ongoing and we cannot provide further details at this time."
Kritenbrink accompanied Blinken on his trip to China a month ago, and Kritenbrink, Burns and Blinken have attended meetings with senior Chinese officials as well as Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Ahead of the high-level talks in Beijing, Kritenbrink led a trip of less senior officials to lay the groundwork.
The State Department last week led the Biden administration's efforts to restart diplomatic communications with China and see progress made in some areas, including climate change and the trade in synthetic opioids. However, deep-seated disagreements on Taiwan, espionage and other issues have led to a deterioration in relations, and broad US political concerns over China have "prevented any turnaround".
According to the report, the hack was accomplished with the help of a flaw in Microsoft's cloud computing environment, which has since been patched. In addition to diplomats, more than two dozen organizations globally were also affected. Fewer than 10 organizations were compromised in the US, each of which appeared to have a small number of individual email accounts
Microsoft has not publicly disclosed how the breach started and has said it is continuing to investigate the incident.
Who can be behind this hack? In theory the Chinese government, but it had taken part in the talks with the US, so it must have known how they had gone, even if having the other side's opinion is useful. Perhaps it may have been a private operator, a large company, to request this action of computer piracy in order to foresee any commercial agreements and take advantage of them. Not only states can hire hackers.
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The article Chinese hackers hack the email account of the US ambassador to China. Who is behind it? comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/hacker-cinesi-violano-laccount-email-dellambasciatore-usa-in-cina-chi-ce-dietro/ on Fri, 21 Jul 2023 08:30:38 +0000.