OAN Staff James Meyers
7:57 AM – Tuesday, December 31, 2024
A China state-sponsored actor affiliated with the Chinese Government recently hacked the U.S. Treasury Department’s workstations in a “major incident,” the agency announced on Monday.
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In a letter obtained by multiple sources, the Treasury Department disclosed the incident to Senate Banking Committee leadership. Officials learned of the breach on December 8th.
“Based on available indicators, the incident has been attributed to a Chinese state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor,” Aditi Hardikar, assistant secretary for management at the U.S. Treasury, wrote in the letter.
The cybercriminal reportedly gained access to Treasury Department workstations and documents via a security key.
“Once Treasury was alerted by the service provider, we immediately contacted Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and have worked with law enforcement partners across the government to ascertain the impact of this incident,” Hardikar said.
Meanwhile, Treasury officials plan to hold a classified briefing about the breach next week with staffers from the House Financial Services Committee, according to CNN. The exact timing of the briefing has not been scheduled yet.
Last week, the White House stated that Chinese officials accessed Americans’ private texts and phone conversations through the targeting of a U.S. telecommunications company, which is the ninth telecom company to be affected by Chinese hacking.
Deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger said that the number of Americans affected by the recent telecom attack is unknown because Chinese hackers are cautious about covering their tracks. Many of the victims were located in Washington, D.C., and Virginia.
“We believe it was the goal of identifying who those phones belong to and if they were government targets of interest for follow-on espionage and intelligence collection of communications, of texts and phone calls on those particular phones,” she explained.
Additionally, the department said it was working with the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
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