(Washington) The US government has been the target of a Chinese cyberattack which notably targeted the State Department, official sources said on Wednesday.
The hack specifically targeted the email accounts of a number of federal agencies, IT giant Microsoft said, citing a “China-based actor Microsoft calls Storm-0558”.
Microsoft did not identify the targets, but a State Department spokesperson said Wednesday that the department responsible for formulating US diplomacy had been hit.
“The State Department has detected abnormal activity and has taken immediate action to secure our information technology systems and will continue to monitor the situation closely,” he said without further details.
“On cybersecurity, we are not disclosing what our response was, and the incident is under investigation,” he added.
According to washington postthe hacked emails were unclassified and the attack does not appear to have affected “the Pentagon” or “the intelligence or military community”.
But US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s email account has been affected, the daily revealed on Wednesday evening, citing US officials speaking on condition of anonymity.
The US Department of Commerce has put in place trade restrictions regarding China, particularly in the field of high technologies, which have provoked the ire of Beijing.
President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, spoke on ABC television about hacking activity that was “detected fairly quickly.”
“We were able to avoid further breaches,” he said.
This new cyberattack comes at a time when the United States and China, which are engaged in fierce competition, have however resumed contacts at the highest level after months of tension, with in particular the visit of the American Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Beijing last month.
In a blog post, Microsoft Executive Vice President Charlie Bell said that “based on our assessments, this adversary is focused on spying by attempting to access email inboxes to harvest” sensitive information.
Microsoft also indicates that it opened an investigation related to “abnormal activities concerning e-mails” on June 16, and that this had made it possible to detect anomalies which took place as early as May 15.
Hackers “primarily target Western government agencies and focus on espionage, theft of data and credentials,” according to the same source.
At the end of May, the United States, Western allies and Microsoft had already denounced a “cyber-actor” sponsored by China who had infiltrated critical infrastructure networks in the United States.
Beijing then denied any involvement and accused the United States of “disinformation”.
For Senator Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, “it is clear that China is considerably improving its intelligence gathering capabilities directed against the United States and our allies”.