Chinese hackers accessed about 60.000 emails and they were stolen from ten different State Department accounts. The case further heightened tensions between China and the United States, with Beijing officially denying any involvement in the actions.
Nine out of 10 email accounts belonged to people working in East Asia Pacific jobs.
Earlier this year, Chinese hackers had already carried out similar attacks and crashed Microsoft's e-mail platform.
Senator Eric Schmidt stated that the government's reliance on individual vendors to facilitate systems, in this case, Microsoft, created unacceptable vulnerabilities in the system. He asked that the Defense Department carefully examine its reliance on similar systems from a single vendor.
"We need to strengthen our defenses against these types of cyberattacks and intrusions in the future, and we need to look carefully at the federal government's reliance on a single vendor as a potential weak point," Schmidt said, vowing to press officials "for more answers to ensure that China and other actors are denied access to the federal government's most sensitive information."
The hack, which compromised email accounts, was first reported in July.
Hackers used a single stolen Microsoft certificate to break into State Department email accounts, Biden administration officials told Senate staff members, and that token was used to hack 25 organizations and government agencies.
It is not yet clear what the content of the emails was. US officials claim that it did not compromise confidential email accounts. The breaches took place in the weeks before Secretary of State Anthony Blinken traveled to China.
He was the first in a series of Biden administration officials to travel to China with the intention of patching up frayed diplomatic ties between Washington and Beijing, while at the same time imposing restrictions on the investment Americans can make in certain Chinese sectors.
ZS/NYT
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