Chinese hackers breached US ambassador’s e-mails, says Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON - Beijing-linked hackers accessed US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns’ e-mail account in an espionage operation thought to have compromised hundreds of thousands of individual US government e-mails, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Thursday.

Mr Daniel Kritenbrink, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, was also hacked in

the wider spying operation disclosed earlier in July by Microsoft,

the report said, citing sources familiar with the matter.

Asked about the reported breach of the two diplomats’ accounts, the US State Department said its investigation was ongoing and declined to give details.

Before the WSJ report appeared, Mr Kritenbrink was asked at a congressional hearing whether he could rule out that his e-mails or his staff’s were targeted in the hack. 

“I can’t comment on an investigation that’s under way being conducted by the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) but no, I will not rule it out,” he said. 

Mr Burns and Mr Kritenbrink join US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo as the only publicly named victims of the espionage campaign, which prompted a warning by Washington’s top diplomat to his Chinese counterpart.

In an e-mail response to Reuters, Mr Liu Pengyu, spokesman for China’s embassy in Washington, said: “China firmly opposes and combats cyber attacks and cyber theft in all forms. This position is consistent and clear.”  

Microsoft said last week that Chinese hackers misappropriated one of its digital keys and used a flaw in its code to steal e-mails from US government agencies and other clients. The company did not immediately return a message seeking comment on the WSJ report.

The breach has thrown Microsoft’s security practices under scrutiny, with officials and lawmakers calling on the Redmond, Washington-based company to make its top level of digital auditing, also called logging, available to all its customers for free. Microsoft said in a statement late on Thursday that it was taking the criticism on board. 

White House National Security Council spokesman Adam Hodge said last week that an intrusion into Microsoft’s cloud security “affected unclassified systems”, without elaborating. 

“Officials immediately contacted Microsoft to find the source and vulnerability in their cloud service,” Mr Hodge added. 

The State Department “detected anomalous activity” and “took immediate steps to secure our systems”, a department spokesman said in a statement at the time. 
REUTERS