Raimondo and Other Biden Officials Hacked by Chinese
GoLocalProv News Team
Raimondo and Other Biden Officials Hacked by Chinese
“The breaches of unclassified email systems, which some officials and experts said may have required extraordinary technical expertise to pull off, raise new alarms about the ability of Chinese hackers to orchestrate more sophisticated attacks and come at a fragile point in U.S.-China relations,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
“China is testing the waters to see what they can get away with and learning that it’s actually a lot,” Cliff Sims, the former deputy director of national intelligence for strategy during the Trump administration, told the Wall Street Journal.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTAs Commerce Secretary, Raimondo oversees trade issues related to China, including export controls on Chinese technologies that have strained bilateral relations.
More than two dozen organizations globally were compromised in the hacking spree, according to Microsoft. Fewer than 10 organizations were compromised in the U.S. and each of those appeared to have a small number of individual email accounts breached, a senior American cybersecurity official said Wednesday.
The hack was discovered in June.
Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen did conduct a visit to meet with China last week despite the Biden administration’s knowledge of the Chinese hack.
The Biden administration has not disclosed the level of damage to secure information of Raimondo or other administration officials.
Cybersecurity specialists at the State Department were the first to detect the espionage campaign that leveraged a flaw in a Microsoft cloud-computing environment, which the company said has since been fixed.
“Last month, US government safeguards identified an intrusion in Microsoft’s cloud security, which affected unclassified systems,” National Security Council spokesperson Adam Hodge said in a statement to CNN.
“Officials immediately contacted Microsoft to find the source and vulnerability in their cloud service,” Hodge said. “We continue to hold the procurement providers of the U.S. Government to a high security threshold.”