Washington DC
According to United States officials, Chinese hackers breached the email of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo as well as several State Department officials in the weeks leading up to State Secretary Antony Blinken’s visit to Beijing in June. An investigation is now underway but the US officials, on Wednesday, downplayed the idea that the Chinese hackers, who are likely to be part of the military or spy services, could have stolen the sensitive information, insisting that no classified email or cloud systems were penetrated. The State Department’s cybersecurity team first discovered the intrusion.
Secretary Raimondo, who has been one of the most outspoken of Beijing’s critics, recently tightened export controls on China, threatening to cut off the country’s supply of US semiconductor technology if it provides the chips to Russia. Notably, she is also expected to visit China by the end of the summer. Based on a preliminary investigation, officials believe she was the only cabinet-level official to be successfully hacked. The hackers were not able to acquire emails in Blinken’s account, even as they got access to other State Department email boxes, officials said. Multiple officials said the attack was aimed at individual email accounts, rather than a large-scale exfiltration of data, which China-based hackers are suspected of having done before.
Officials from President Joe Biden’s administration declined to give a full account of which group had targeted the officials. Microsoft had, earlier last week, revealed that the Chinese hackers with the intention to collect intelligence on the US have gained access to government email accounts. The attack was “targeted”, according to a person briefed on the intrusion into the government networks, with the hackers going after specific accounts rather than carrying out a broad-brush intrusion that would suck up enormous amounts of data.
The State Department discovered the intrusion on 16 June and informed Microsoft that very day, ahead of Blinken’s trip to Beijing—the State Secretary left that evening. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also recently visited Beijing. President Biden and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping agreed in a meeting in Bali, Indonesia, last November to try to stabilise relations, but tensions between the two nations ramped up when the Pentagon discovered and shot down a Chinese spy balloon that was floating over the continental United States in early February. The State Department on Wednesday said that after detecting “anomalous activity,” the government took steps to secure the systems and “will continue to closely monitor and quickly respond to any further activity.” After the State Department reported the hack to Microsoft, the company found that the hackers had also targeted some 25 organisations, including government agencies.