Emails of U.S. Ambassador to China Breached By Chinese Hackers – One America News Network

July 21, 2023 Shawntel Smith-Hill US 0

MEYRIN, SWITZERLAND - APRIL 19: A detailed view in the CERN Computer / Data Centre and server farm of the 1450 m2 main room during a behind the scenes tour at CERN, the World's Largest Particle Physics Laboratory on April 19, 2017 in Meyrin, Switzerland. Experiments at CERN generate colossal amounts of data (the LHC experiments produce over 30 petabytes of data per year). The Data Centre stores it, and sends it around the world for analysis. Archiving the vast quantities of data is an essential function at CERN. CERN has more than 130 Petabytes of stored data (the equivalent of 700 years of full HD-quality movies). CERN does not have the computing or financial resources to crunch all of the data on site, so in 2002 it turned to grid computing to share the burden with computer centres around the world. The centre maintains disk and tape servers, which need to be upgraded regularly. (Photo by Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images) — (Photo by Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images)

OAN’s Shawntel Smith-Hill
3:47PM – Friday, July 21, 2023

Chinese hackers linked to Beijing breached the email account of United States Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, as well as several other top U.S. officials including the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, Daniel Kritenbrink, and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo.

The breach comes amid a series of trips to China by top Biden officials and is a part of a larger intelligence-gathering campaign.

Allegedly hackers were able to gain access to hundreds of thousands of U.S. government emails although they were reportedly limited to unclassified mail, officials from the Biden administration believe hackers may have gained insight into internal communications regarding U.S. policy. This comes as U.S. secretary of State Antony Blinken is slated to travel to China.

The breach appeared to be surgical in nature, particularly honing in on a certain senior official tasked with managing the U.S. China relationship.

The hackers were able to leverage a flaw in Microsoft’s cloud-computing environment that according to the company has since been fixed.

Rob Joyce, the cybersecurity director at the National Security Agency, said at the Aspen Security Forum on Thursday. “It is China doing espionage.”

“That is what nation-states do. We need to defend against it, we need to push back on it, but that is something that happens.”

China’s theft of American intellectual property is the single greatest heist in world history.

The U.S. government makes cybersecurity guidance publicly available to help businesses protect their proprietary information from Chinese hackers. pic.twitter.com/r5WJ4RZp79

— Senator Ted Budd (@SenTedBuddNC) July 20, 2023