All The Times China Was Accused Of Hacking US (image @Pixabay)
The United States recently accused Chinese government for the alleged hacking attempts against the US Treasury Department’s computer security guardrails. Washington said that hackers linked to the Chinese government, breached the security guardrails in early December, and stole unclassified documents. Beijing denied the allegations.
Chine denied the allegations. China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning claimed the allegations made by the US were “baseless” and “lacking evidence”, reported AP. “China consistently opposes all forms of hacking and firmly rejects the dissemination of false information targeting China for political purposes”, she said.
Liu Pengyu, Chinese Embassy spokesman also dismissed the accusations and called them an effort to “smear” China’s reputation. “The U.S. needs to stop using cybersecurity to smear and slander China, and stop spreading all kinds of disinformation about the so-called Chinese hacking threats,” he said in a statement.
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In a letter that notifies the incident to lawmakers, the US Treasury Department called the infiltration a “major incident”. It also said that the hackers compromised third-party cybersecurity service provider BeyondTrust and were able to access employee workstations. This is not the first time US has accused China for committing security breaches. Beijing was accused of a series of security breaches at telecommunications companies and government agencies in the US and other Western countries in 2024.
As per the Treasury Department’s letter, in the alleged latest attack, hackers “gained access to a key used by the vendor to secure a cloud-based service used to remotely provide technical support for Treasury Departmental Offices (DO) end users”.
“With access to the stolen key, the threat actor was able to override the service’s security, remotely access certain Treasury DO user workstations, and access certain unclassified documents maintained by those users”, it added.
In October last month, China linked hackers targeted phones used by Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance. People working for Vice-President Kamala Harris’s campaign were also targeted, as per media report. The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa) said “unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure” was carried out by “actors affiliated with the People’s Republic of China”.
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Reportedly, the hacks seem to have been aimed at collecting data related to individuals in power that could benefit the Chinese government. The hackers have also accessed a database of phone numbers subject to law enforcement wiretaps, the knowledge which, experts believe could be used to discover which foreign spies are under surveillance, as per media report.
AT&T and Verizon, two of America’s largest telecom companies, acknowledged that they were targeted by the Chinese-linked Salt Typhoon cyberespionage operation. White House said seven other top telecommunications firms were also targeted by hackers. The data of millions of Americans could have been compromised in attacks on these telecom companies.
Full details on the hackers are yet to be released. US authorities believe these security breaches are being orchestrated by different units linked to the Chinese state. Operations linked by Western governments to China have also targeted the UK’s Electoral Commission, and the UK and New Zealand parliaments, reported BBC.
(With inputs from agencies)
