In a major security breach, an intelligence agency linked to the Beijing government found the email addresses of the US ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, and Daniel Kritenbrink, assistant secretary of state for East Asia, The Wall Street Journal report.
The Gateway Pundit already report that China is using a flaw in the Microsoft Cloud to launch a cyberattack on the email accounts of US government officials.
According to the New York Times said: “For a whole month, a conspiracy in which a Chinese group claimed that the company was engaged in espionage, went undetected.”
“Chinese hackers accessed the email accounts of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and other State and Commerce Department officials in the weeks before Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken’s trip to Beijing in June, US officials said Wednesday.”
It added, “Based on their initial investigation, officials believe he was the only successful victim of the hack. The hackers were unable to access emails in Mr. Blinken’s Microsoft 365 account, even after accessing State Department mailboxes, officials said.
Laura Ingraham reported these findings, “even though the Fed spent, what, 15.6 billion on cybersecurity, more than the average GDP, which, 75 countries, the Chinese cyberspies were able to use a huge gap in the Microsoft cloud, helping them to hack emails from the department government and other organizations. But this shouldn’t be surprising, because Microsoft has had a strong relationship with China for many years.”
Ingraham said Microsoft gave the Chinese government access to the source code for its Windows operating system.
According to the Wall Street Journal, in addition to US Secretary of State Gina Raimondo, two other senior officials of the Biden administration were kidnapped in a cyber-espionage attack.
“Burns and Kritenbrink are the second and third senior Biden officials to be identified in their reports as to whether their emails were hacked,” he said.
More from WSJ:
Hackers linked to Beijing broke into the email account of the US ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, in an attack that is believed to have compromised hundreds of thousands of US government emails, according to people familiar with the matter.
Daniel Kritenbrink, assistant secretary of state for East Asia, was also kidnapped in a cyber-espionage operation, the people said. The two ambassadors are believed to be senior State Department officials involved in the campaign that was reported last week, one of the people said.
The nature of the campaign is unclear. Although limited to anonymous emails, the inboxes of Burns and Kritenbrink could have allowed the hackers to learn more about US plans for a recent visit to China by Biden administration officials, as well as internal discussions about US policies against his opponent during the negotiations that have been repeatedly criticized in the recent months.
It appears that Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s email account was not directly accessed in the hack, nor were those among his top advisers, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Instead, the hackers appeared to be targeting a handful of officials responsible for overseeing US-China relations.
Estimates of the number of emails found are complex and could grow, the people said.
“For security reasons, we do not share information on the nature of cybersecurity at this time,” the State Department said.
“The department is constantly monitoring and responding to concerns about our network. Our investigation is ongoing, and we cannot provide more information at this time,” he added.