Chinese Hackers Reportedly Had Access to Senior Biden Officials’ Emails
Well, it looks like those sneaky Chinese hackers have been at it again! According to reports, they’ve been busy accessing email accounts at around 25 organizations, including a couple of US government agencies. And guess what? They even managed to get their grubby little hands on the email accounts of Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and State Department officials! Talk about a major oopsie!
But don’t worry, folks, the US government detected the breach “fairly rapidly” and managed to prevent any further damage. Phew! Crisis averted! And it’s not like this is the first time something like this has happened, right? I mean, who can forget the good old days of the Cold War when we were all paranoid about Soviet spies infiltrating our government? Ah, memories…
Anyway, back to the present. Apparently, Microsoft was one of the organizations targeted by these hackers. And get this: the hacking group even had a cool name – Storm-0558! Sounds like something out of a Marvel movie, doesn’t it?
Microsoft said that the group used digital authentication tokens to access webmail accounts running on their Outlook service. And as with any nation-state actor activity (whatever that means), Microsoft has contacted all targeted or compromised organizations directly to help them investigate and respond. So, that’s nice of them.
Of course, China’s embassy in London denies any involvement in the hacking operation and calls the US government “the world’s biggest hacking empire and global cyber thief.” Classic deflection tactics, am I right?
But don’t worry, folks, everything’s under control. The State Department “detected anomalous activity” and “took immediate steps to secure our systems.” And the Commerce Department took “immediate action” after Microsoft notified them of a compromise. So, no harm done, right?
Oh, and by the way, private sector cybersecurity experts say that this just goes to show how Chinese groups are improving their cyber capabilities. Yay for progress!
It seems that there have been reports of Chinese state-linked hackers accessing email accounts of several US government agencies and Microsoft. According to [1], at least six state governments were hacked by Chinese hackers in the last year. The hackers were able to exploit vulnerabilities in internet-facing programs, such as an animal health reporting app. The report also suggests that the victims and data targeted by the hackers were consistent with an espionage operation. Additionally, [2] reports that the hacking group, dubbed Storm-0558 by Microsoft, had reportedly gained access to email accounts at around 25 organizations, including at least two US government agencies and Microsoft. The US State and Commerce Departments were among the affected agencies, and hackers reportedly had access to the email accounts of Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and State Department officials. It is unclear if these incidents are related or if they involve the same hacking group.
