US blames China for hacking Treasury Department | Cyber ​​Security News

The unclassified documents were stolen after a hack earlier this month, according to a Treasury letter to Congress.

Chinese state-sponsored hackers managed to steal unclassified documents from US Treasury workstations earlier this month, the US Treasury Department said.

Hackers were able to take over a third-party cybersecurity service provider and gain access to documents in what it described as a “major incident,” the department said Monday.

“(Hackers) gained access to a key used by a vendor to provide a cloud-based service used to provide remote technical support to Treasury Department (DO) end users,” the US Treasury Department’s letter to Congress said. “With access to the stolen key, the threat actor was able to compromise the security of the service, remotely access certain Treasury DO user workstations, and access certain unclassified documents maintained by those users.”

In a Treasury statement, the department “takes all threats to our systems and the information they hold very seriously.”

The Treasury Department was alerted to the hack on Dec. 8 by cybersecurity provider BeyondTrust. The department says it is working with the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI to assess the impact of the hack.

“The trusted BeyondTrust service has been taken offline and there is no evidence that a threat actor continues to have access to Treasury systems or data,” a Treasury Department spokesperson told AFP.

In the letter sent to the leadership of the Banking Committee of the US Senate, he directly accused China and said that the incident “belongs to an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor funded by the Chinese state.”

An APT is a cyberattack where a hacker can maintain undetected and unauthorized access to a target for a period of time.

The Treasury Department said more information will be released later in a follow-up report.

The hack was reported less than a month before the inauguration of US President-elect Donald Trump.

Trump has threatened China with a trade war and tariffs. Beijing is not doing enough, he said stop the flow of the opioid fentanyl into the United States.

Both Trump’s Republicans and Democrats have warned against China’s threats to the United States, particularly in the area of ​​cyber security.

In September, the US Department of Justice said it had shut down a cyberattack network operated by Chinese-backed hackers that affected 200,000 devices worldwide.

And in early December, the US China has imposed sanctions on a cyber security firm and a researcher on a 2020 attack that attempted to exploit a computer software vulnerability in company firewalls.

China denies any involvement in the attacks and says it opposes all forms of cyber attacks.