Unidentified documents were stolen after a hack earlier this month, according to a Treasury letter to Congress.
Hackers sponsored by the Chinese government managed to steal illegal documents from the offices of the United States Treasury earlier this month, the US Treasury Department said.
On Monday, the Ministry said hackers were able to compromise a third-party cybersecurity company and obtain documents in what it described as a “major incident”.
“[The hackers] gained access to a key used by a vendor to secure a cloud-based service used to provide technical assistance to end users of the Department of the Treasury (DO),” said a letter sent by the US Treasury Department to Congress. of the Treasury DO, and accessed certain unclassified documents maintained by those users.”
A statement from the Treasury said the department “takes seriously all threats to our systems, and the data they hold”.
The Treasury Department was notified of a hack by cyber security firm BeyondTrust on December 8. The department says it is working with the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI to assess the impact of the breach.
“The disrupted BeyondTrust service has been taken offline and there is no evidence to suggest that the threat actor continued to access Treasury systems or data,” a Treasury spokesman told AFP.
A letter to the leadership of the US Senate Banking Committee directly blamed China, saying that the incident “is about an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor sponsored by the Chinese government”.
APT is a cyberattack in which a cybercriminal can maintain undetected and unauthorized access to a target for a period of time.
The Ministry of Finance said more details would be released in a further report later.
The report of the hacking comes less than a month before the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump.
Trump has threatened China with a trade war and tariffs, saying Beijing has not done enough to stop the flow of opioid fentanyl to the US.
Both Trump’s Republicans and Democrats have warned of Chinese threats against the US, especially in the field of cyber security.
In September, the US Department of Justice said it had busted a cyberattack network run by Chinese-backed hackers that affected 200,000 devices around the world.
And in early December, the US sanctioned a Chinese cybersecurity firm and researcher over a 2020 attack that attempted to exploit computer software vulnerabilities in the company’s firewalls.
China has denied involvement in the attack and says it opposes all forms of cyber attacks.
Source link
