The warning about the attack was triggered almost immediately after Chinese spyware targeted the agency’s email systems at Microsoft in mid-June
Washington, USA26 Sep 2023, 15:04 4366 read 0 comments
A recent hacking attack on US government emails revealed in June and linked to China could have gone unnoticed for much longer if not for the intervention of an enterprising government IT analyst, Politico reports, citing government officials as saying:
“A State Department cybersecurity expert led efforts to integrate a personalized alert mechanism into the agency’s network more than two years ago in anticipation of future hacker attacks.”
The warning about the attack was triggered almost immediately after Chinese spyware targeted the agency’s email systems at Microsoft in mid-June. This allows the agency to notify the company and the rest of the US government of the sophisticated espionage campaign.
Attack
The hack, which the tech giant disclosed in July, did compromise the unclassified emails of high-ranking officials at the US State and Commerce Departments, including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China.
The revelation by the State Department underscores both how federal agencies are adapting to counter increasingly sophisticated cyber threats and how easily Chinese hackers could get away with spying, the publication commented.
Christopher Painter, a former State Department cybersecurity coordinator under the Obama and Trump administrations, commented that while it was “great” that an analyst spotted the potential problem, “these discoveries sometimes come down to luck.”
“In a strange way, despite all the advances we have in cybersecurity, sometimes it comes down to one person seeing something that’s anomalous,” Painter says.
Key
The State Department was the first to report the attack, saying the hackers used a powerful digital key stolen through a “cascade of internal security lapses” and “penetrating more than two dozen organizations around the world and at least 10 in the US.”
The analyst who created the defense, whom the State Department has not named, did a “heroic job,” said Kelly Fletcher, the agency’s chief information officer and head of the Bureau of Information Resources Management.
The State Department’s actions likely prevented Beijing from gaining broader access to the private communications of key US officials amid an intense period of diplomacy between the world’s two largest economies.
Visit
After the State Department detected the hack, Raimondo, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and US climate envoy John Kerry were on visits to China.
The US government has not formally blamed Beijing for the hacking attack, and Fletcher and other State Department IT officials would not comment on what the hackers were after or who they were. But in July, Microsoft confirmed that it was Chinese hackers.
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2023-09-26 12:01:08
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