Jul 14, 2023, 5:17am EDT
SECURITY
China ups hacks on US government. Preparing for war?
Microsoft announced this week that a Chinese cyber unit, codenamed Storm-0558, hacked this spring into U.S. government agencies and the private emails of senior U.S. officials. Among them: Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who’s taken a hawkish stance on constricting American tech exports to China that would make her a prime target for Beijing.
These cyber intrusions came as the Biden administration was publicly working to ease tensions with China. And they dovetail with evidence of China’s stepped-up surveillance operations against the U.S., including the deployment of spy balloons in the Western hemisphere and the establishment of new electronic surveillance bases in Cuba. Microsoft said the Chinese exploited weaknesses in the company’s authentication software to access these U.S. government accounts, which weren’t believed to be hosting classified data.
Adam Marrè, chief information security officer at the cybersecurity firm, Arctic Wolf, told Semafor on Thursday that these Chinese hacks are part of a growing wave of cyber-attacks on high-level U.S. government targets and critical infrastructure that are positioning Beijing for a possible conflict with Washington and its allies. In May, Microsoft issued a report outlining Chinese efforts to infiltrate malware into the Pentagon’s communications systems in Guam — a key staging base for any American military operations to defend Taiwan.
https://www.semafor.com/article/07/13/2023/china-ups-hacks-on-us-government-preparing-for-war
